Dame Athene Margaret Donald DBE FRS HonFInstP HonFRSC (née Griffith; born 15 May 1953)[1][3] is a British physicist.

She earned a bachelor's degree in Natural Science (Theoretical Physics), followed by a PhD in 1977 for research on electron microscopy of grain boundary embrittled systems.

Her major domain of study is soft matter physics, particularly its applications to living organisms and the relationship between structure and other properties.

Here she was able to demonstrate the ubiquity of the so-called banded texture after shear of LCP's and study the underlying packing of the molecules by electron microscopy showing how they followed a serpentine trajectory in several thermotropics.

She also carried out important work on lyotropic systems, including a synthetic polypeptide, studying its gelation and phase diagram.

Structural changes during cooking, with the amylopectin molecule imaginatively treated as a side chain liquid crystalline polymer, brought understanding to different processing treatments.

Donald's recent work has demonstrated that this important and challenging problem can be powerfully addressed by the approaches of polymer science and furthermore suggests an intriguing connection between the structures observed in both fields.

[39] Her nomination reads:[3] Athene Donald is distinguished for her work relating mechanical properties to the structure of polymers.

She pioneered studies of thermotropic liquid crystalline polymers via transmission electron microscopy, revealing the ubiquity of banded textures after shear flow in these materials.