Women Scientists and Explorers

Grace Murray Hopper

(December 9, 1906 - January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944, and invented the first compiler for a computer programming language.]

Wangari Maathai

environmentalist and doctor who saw much environmental damage in Africa and led a movement to stop and reverse the damage. She won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work. She is an Kenyan environmentalist_ feminist_ human rights activists_educator_Green Belt Movement 1940_2011 ZK

Carolyn Kloth-

meteorologist- - tracks thunderstorms in Kansas City, Missouri-graduated from Florida State University- http://www.nwas.org/committees/avnwinterwx/Kloth.htm

Lisa Randall

Theoretical Physicist at Harvard in 2016 that says, "There's no reason to think that dark matter is composed of all the same type of particle," Randall says. "We certainly see a diversity of particles in the one sector of matter we do know about, ordinary matter. Why shouldn't we think the same of dark matter?"

Junko Tabei

First woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, in 1975, following the same route as Sir Edmund Hillary.

Margaret Murie

ionist who dedicated her life to protecting the wilderness in the United States. 1902-

Mae Jemison

the first African American to travel in space

Dr Elizabeth Blackwell - OB/GYN

1821-1910- English-born physician, was the first female MD in the United States. Rejected by many medical schools due to her gender, she ended up getting a place at the Geneva Medical College in New York, where she had to put up with a lot of poorly mannered classmates and a professor who thought she should leave the room for lectures on reproductive anatomy in order to protect her "delicate sensibilities".

Madam Marie Sklodowska Curie

1867-1934. Polish physicist and chemist. Pioneer in the field of radioactivity, and is the first and only person awarded the Nobel Prize in two different sciences.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow-

Nobel Prize winner in medicine for developing the radio-immunoassay procedure with peptide hormones. She is the first American born woman to win a Nobel Prize in science. This happened in 1977. She also won National Medal of Science in our country, its highest science award. "I think discovery is the most exciting thing in the world."

Barbara McClintock-

Nobel Prize winner- Discovered jumping genes, (1902-1992) discovered transposons Nobel prize 1983. , Identified changes in the color of Indian corn kernels that made sense by postulating that some genetic elements move from other genome locations into the genes for kernel color., *genes dont always stay in one place

Lise Meitner

Nobel Prize winner- Nuclear Physicist- Swedish physicist (born in Austria) who worked in the field of radiochemistry with Otto Hahn and formulated the concept of nuclear fission with Otto Frisch (1878-1968) periodic table

Chien-Shiung Wu

Nobel Prize winner- it is shameful that there are so few women in science... In China there are many, many women in physics. There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This is the fault of men. In Chinese society, a woman is valued for what she is, and men encourage her to accomplishments yet she remains eternally feminine. Quoted in 'Queen of Physics', Newsweek (20 May 1963) no. 61, 20. Science quotes on: | Women Scientists (13)

Ada Lovelace

Was a mathematician who is widely considered to have written the first computer program, working with Charles Babbage on his plans for a sort of proto-computer, the "analytic engine". Babbage once entreated her: "Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans - everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers."

Rosalyn Yallow

Which scientist developed RIA technology used in the measurement of insulin Radioimmunoassay

Vera Rubin

Who discovered dark matter through study of the flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies? Which 1970s astronomer discovered that the disks of spiral galaxies rotate faster than the gravity from the visible matter in the galaxy should permit? Who discovered that the gravity of something massive and invisible was forcing the stars to go fast in galaxies?

Nettie Stevens

discovered that sex-dependent hereditary differences are due to 2 X chromosomes in females, and XY in males.

Elizabeth Blackburn

discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and telomerase pioneered research on the structure of telomeres, the ends of the chromosomes. She was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak, for their discovery that telomeres are protected from progressive shortening by the enzyme telomerase

Hypatia

first women to earn fame as a mathematician, taught Greek philosophy, astronomy and mathematics

Karen Horney

neo-Freudian, psychodynamic; criticized Freud, stated that personality is molded by current environments which generate fears and impulses, rather than being determined solely by childhood experiences and instincts, neurotic trends; concept of "basic anxiety" credited with founding women's psychology

Agnodice

4th BCE physician who dressed as a man to practice medicine. She is a figure often mentioned in the histories of the medical profession.

Esther Lederberg

DNA transfer through bacterial infection discovered that mutations conveying antibiotic resistance were not induced by the environment

Virginia Apgar

Designed the first method to evaluate a newborn's transition to life outside the womb using the apgar score. 1909-1974

Ruth Benedict

Developed the "culture and personality" movement, establishing the study of cultures as collective personalities. 1887-1948- Anthropologist

Sally Ride

1st and youngest U.S. woman in space; June, 1983

Rita Colwell: Keeping Her Aim on Cholera

the internationally acclaimed oceanographer and microbiologist, has spent the bulk of her career studying the microscopic Vibrio cholerae (V. cholerae) bacterium that causes cholera. She and her colleagues have found V. cholerae in oceans around the world, in isolated lakes and rivers untouched by fecal contamination, and even in volcanic springs in Iceland. Colwell and her team were the first to use remote satellite data to develop a predictive model for cholera outbreaks in east Asia, and she is the first scientist to link global warming with a potential rise in cases of infections disease.

Ellen Ochoa

the worlds first Hispanic female astronaut in 1991

Renee Askins

wildlife ecologist led to battle to reintroduce grey wolf into Yellowstone Park; 1959-

Delia Akeley

Born in 1875, led expeditions to Africa, studying the ethnography of such reclusive tribes as the Forest People pygmies in the 1930s, and exploring the Tana River in a dugout canoe.

Rosalind Franklin

Nobel Prize winner as a X-Ray Crystallographer, she discovered the structure of DNA!

Mary Agnes Chase

Botanist who identified thousands of types of grass all over the world, was the world's greatest agrostologist*

Ada E. Yonath

(Hebrew: עדה יונת‎, pronounced [ˈada joˈnat]) (born 22 June 1939[1]) is an Israeli crystallographer- won a Nobel Prize for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome

Alice Ball

(July 24, 1892 - December 31, 1916) was an African American chemist who developed an injectable oil extract that was the most effective treatment for leprosy until the 1940s

Ceclia Payne-Gaposchkin

(born May 10, 1900, Wendover, Eng.—died Dec. 7, 1979, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.) British-born American astronomer who discovered that stars are made mainly of hydrogen and helium and established that stars could be classified according to their temperatures.

Hildegard of Bingen

(d. 1179) abbess and musician and general leader and healer using herbs who was well-known and powerful

Anna Atkins Botanist

(née Children; 16 March 1799 - 9 June 1871) English botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. Some sources claim that she was the first woman to create a photograph.

Margaret Mead

..., "if gender is based on biological differences b/w men and women, people everywhere should define 'feminine' and 'masculine' in the same way." Concluded that culture is key to gender distinctions, Anthropologist who observed the Tchambuli people of New Guinea, where gender roles are the opposite of those in America

Mamie Phipps Clark

A black women who was from an affluent family in Hot Springs AR. Wasn't allowed to study math and physics so studied psychology instead. Developed the doll test used in brown v. board of education Started "north side center for child development" Carried out pioneering work on how children of color grew to recognize racial differences

Elizabeth Blackwell

A woman who challenging the taboo of professional women. She is the first female doctor in the United States, (3 February 1821 - 31 May 1910) as well as the first woman on the UK Medical Register. She was the first openly identified woman to graduate from medical school, a pioneer in promoting the education of women in medicine in the United States, and a social and moral reformer in both the United States and in England.

Joy Adamson

Activist for wild animals (mostly lions). She got stabbed in Kenya. Naturalist. Wrote: Born Free 1910-1980

Katia Krafft

Also, known as Catherine Joséphine Conrad, Mulhouse, born April 17, 1942 and died in a lava flow on June 3, 1991 with her husband, Maurice Paul Krafft . She was a French volcanologists who died in a pyroclastic flow on Mount Unzen, in Japan, on June 3, 1991. She was known for being pioneers in filming, photographing and recording volcanoes, often getting within feet of lava flows.

Katherine Johnson

American physicist, space scientist, and mathematician. She contributed to the United States' aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. She has won a Presidential Metal of Freedom.

Julia Butterfly Hill

Best known for living in a Redwood tree for over two years in order to impede logging in a California forest in 1997-1999. Her act brought worldwide awareness to the problems of deforestation and inspired many to take action for the earth.

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Biologist who won the Novel Prize for embryonic developments of fruit flies

Claudia Alexander

Claudia Alexander, who played a pioneering role in NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter and the international Rosetta space-exploration project, died on July 11, 2015 in Arcadia, Calif. She was 56. Was a rarity at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for two reasons: She was a woman, and she was black. She was also considered a brilliant scientist.

Nettie Maria Stevens

Early American geneticist. She and Edmund Beecher Wilson were the first researchers to describe the chromosomal basis of sex, but they conducted their research independently of each other.

Alissa J. Arp

Ecological Physiologist- As a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, Participated in eight deep-sea submersible dives to depths in excess of one and a half miles.

Edith Clarke

Electrical Engineer who designed hydroelectric dams and wrote one of the most important books on electrical engineering circuit analysis of A-D Power systems

Hertha Ayrton

Engineer, Mathematician and Inventor who registered 26 patents and was good friends with Marie Curie who studied wind motion and water vertices and invented a line divider for architects.

Annie Easley

First Black Woman leader developing computers and created first computer calculator- Hybrid Car, made other kinds of calculators

Patricia Bath

First black American physician to receive a patent for a medical invention associated to cataract surgery Ophthalmologist; First African-American female physician to receive a patent for a medical invention. Inventions relate tocataract surgery and include the Laserphaco Probe, which revolutionized the industry in the 1980s, and an ultrasound technique for treatment.

Maria Agnesi

First female mathematician, textbook on differential calculus, curve she studied was named "Witch of Agnesi" 1718-1799- appointed math professor

Majora Carter

Gave her inspiring talk "Greening the Ghetto" at TED in 2006. She has since gained national momentum in her approach to community development that has created miles of green spaces in her neighborhood, the South Bronx. She powerfully articulates the links between race, poverty, and environmental issues, stating that "no community should have to deal with a disproportionate amount of environmental burdens while enjoying few environmental benefits."

Mary-Claire King

Genetics - Use next generation sequencing approaches to identify genes responsible for complex human conditions. Their primary areas of interest are inherited breast and ovarian cancer, the genetics of schizophrenia, and Mendelian disorders in founder populations.

Florence Bascom

Geologist and Educator who helped inform us about how mountains are formed, published over 48 scientific papers, with students who are also top geologists

Kia K. Baptist-

Geoscientist- "Part of the process of science is attacking a problem and trying to find answers, but don't be intimidated if you don't find answers right away. Just keep learning." "A key to being a scientist is to be unafraid to ask questions and unafraid that there may not be answers." Kia K. Baptist-Geoscientist. - She works for an oil company. Her job is to help find oil and natural gas resources.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel prize winner in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She is the second female to win a Nobel Prize in physics, after Marie Curie.

Maria Sibylla Merian

In 1647, was born in Frankfurt, Germany at the time of the belief in spontaneous generation and proved "summer birds" were not from mud but exposed the life cycles of insects with careful observation since a child.

Jean Bennett

Jean discovered genes that cause generative retina degeneration and tries to help heal this disease.

Katsuko Saruhashi

Katsuko Saruhashi was a Japanese geochemist who made some of the first measurements of carbon dioxide levels in seawater and subsequently showed the evidence in seawater and the atmosphere of the dangers of radioactive fallout 1920-2007

Clara Barton

Launched the American Red Cross in 1881. An "angel" in the Civil War, she treated the wounded in the field., -School teacher who volunteered as a nurse during the American Civil War

Emmy Noether

Nobel Prize winner in math- first and only woman invited to address the International Congress of Mathematics in Zurich, Switzerland in 1932. Einstein wrote she was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced.

Maryam Mirzakhani

Math professor at Stanford. Learned over the years to think big. "You have to ignore low-hanging fruit, which is a little tricky," she said. "I'm not sure if it's the best way of doing things, actually — you're torturing yourself along the way." But she enjoys it, she said. "Life isn't supposed to be easy."

Florence Nightingale

Monicha N. - Florence said,"I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions, and into actions which bring results. " She held that the universe—including human communities—was evolving in accordance with a divine plan; that it was human's business to endeavor to understand this plan and guide actions in sympathy with it. But to understand God's thoughts, she held we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose. Thus the study of statistics was for her a religious duty.

Margaret Hamilton- software engineer

NASA HONORS APOLLO ENGINEER Leader of the team that developed the flight software for the agency's Apollo missions, has been granted a NASA Exceptional Space Act Award for her scientific and technical contributions.

Maria Goeppert Mayer

Nobel Prize winner for discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure

Rita Levi-Montalcini

Nobel Prize winner for discoveries of growth factors JF

Gertrude Elion

Nobel Prize winner for discoveries of important principles for drug treatment.

Gerty Radnitz Cori

Nobel Prize winner for discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen- Discovered the effects of sugar in diabetes

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

Nobel Prize winner for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances

Iren Joliot-Curie

Nobel Prize winner for synthesis of new radioactive elements

Cristiane Nusslein-Volhard

Nobel Prize winner in Physiology and Medicine 1995- Developmental Biology from Germany -

Jocelyn Bell Bernell

Nobel Prize winner in astronomy and physics from England who discovered pulsars at age 24. A pulsar is a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Saved the River of Grass- our water supply, The Everglades

Marianne North (24 October 1830 - 30 August 1890)

Scientific Illustrator/Painter - Traveled the world documenting species both plants and animals. Worked with Charles Darwin.

Mary Evelyn Tucker

Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at Yale University where she teaches in a joint master's degree program between the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Divinity School.

Hedy Lamarr- Techie

She invented "frequency hopping" technology, which was put to use in a secret communications system and in radio-controlled torpedoes in WWII, which in turn laid the foundations for future technological developments such as Wi-Fi and GPS.

Jane Cook Wright

She is also known as "Jane Jones". Who was born on November 30, 1919 and died on February 19, 2013 and was a pioneering cancer researcher and surgeon noted for her contributions to chemotherapy? In particular, she is credited with developing the technique of using human tissue culture rather than laboratory mice to test the effects of potential drugs on cancer cells. She also pioneered the use of the drug methotrexate to treat breast cancer and skin cancer.

Valentina Tereshkova

Soviet cosmonaut and the first woman -- and first civilian -- to fly into space in 1963, orbiting the Earth 48 times.

Gertrude Beeks

THE SOUTHERN GIRL CHOSEN BY SECRETARY TAFT TO INVESTIGATE CONDITIONS AT PANAMA. SHE'S OFF TO REPORT OF EVERYTHING RELATING TO THE HEALTH, MORALS AND COMPORT OF THE ARMY OF CANAL BUILDERS THAT WORK FOR UNCLE SAM- the USA.

Ruth Benerito

Taught High School Math/Science and Drivers Education- developed wrinkle free cotton cloth and had patents for the formula- 1916-2013

Rachel Carson

United States biologist remembered for her opposition to the use of pesticides that were hazardous to wildlife (1907-1964)

Vandana Shiva

Using the seed as a symbol of hope, is leading a global movement to bring food and farming out from the control of corporations and back into the hands of farmers.

Mary Anning

credited with discovering marine dinosaurs; lived in England- 1799-1847- paleontologist

Inge Lehmann

seismologist that discovered the inner core in 1936, that between outer core and inner core, p-waves pass through inner (therefore it is solid)