Women of Science

Mary Anning

Mary Anning (1799-1847) was a paleontologist who discovered a fossilized ichthyosaurus skeleton when she was twelve. She went on to have many more discoveries in the field of paleontology.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was a mathematician who developed early ideas about computer programming.

Annie Cannon

Annie Cannon (1863-1941) was an astronomer who developed the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types.

Marie Curie

Marie Curie (1867-1934) was a physicist and chemist who discovered several radioactive elements, including radium. She was the first woman to win a Nobel prize and the first person to win two Nobel prizes. She won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the theory of radioactivity. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of polonium and radium.

Emily Noether

Emily Noether (1882-1935) was a mathematician who made many contributions to abstract algebra, including a theorem showing the relationship between symmetries of natures and conversation laws.

Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner (1878-1968) discovered the process of nuclear fission and the element protactinium. Chemical element 109 meitnerium is named after her.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) wrote a PhD thesis theorizing that the sun was made mostly of hydrogen and helium. This idea was initially rejected because it was contrary to the accepted theory that the concentration of elements in the sun had the same ratio as the elements on Earth. She also did foundational work on variable stars.

Barbara McClintock

Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) studied the genetics of corn, discovered transposons and the importance of telomeres and centromeres. She won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work in the genetics.

Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper (1906-1992) was a pioneer in computer programming, being the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and developed the COBOL programming language.

Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972) was a theoretical physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and proposed the nuclear shell model, for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1963.

Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was a marine biologist and early conservationist who wrote the book “Silent Spring”, published in 1962, warning of the dangers of pesticides such as DDT. The book is widely credited with raising the public consciousness regarding environmental concerns.

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) was a chemist who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for using X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of vitamin B12. She confirmed the structure of penicillin and determined the structure of insulin as well.

Heddy Lamarr

Heddy Lamarr (1914-2000) was a famous actress who played an important role during World War II in developing a radio guidance system for torpedoes that used frequency-hopping to prevent radio jamming.

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was an x-ray crystallographer whose work was essential in determining the structure of DNA, as well as RNA and graphite.

Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall (born 1934) is a primatologist and anthropologist who studied chimpanzees.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born 1943) is an astrophysicist who discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967.

Donna Strickland

Donna Strickland (born 1959) is a pioneer in the field of pulsed lasers and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2018 for developing high-intensity ultrashort laser technology.

Shirley Ann Jackson

Shirley Ann Jackson (born 1946) is a theoretical physicist. She was the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate at MIT. She served as chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Mae Jemison

Mae Jemison (born 1956) is an engineer, physician and astronaut. She was the first African-American woman astronaut, serving as mission specialist aboard a space shuttle in 1992.

Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Doudna (born 1964) is a biochemist who developed CRISPR as a gene editing technique, for which she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.