March is #WomensHistoryMonth and we are celebrating by highlighting female pioneers, both past and present, in STEM fields. Read on to learn more about women astronauts, chemists, computer scientists, geologists, mathematicians, paleontologists, physicists, and more!
Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first African American woman to become a physician in the United States & the only female physician author in the 19th century!
Marie Tharp was an American geologist & oceanographic cartographer who helped create the 1st scientific map of Earth's entire sea floor, revealing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge & changing the way earth scientists thought about the Earth's crust & its movement. (photo: Bruce Gilbert)
Florence Bascom was the 1st woman to be hired by the U.S. Geological Survey & the 1st woman to earn a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. She's most known for her work with petrography (the description & classification of rocks, usually by microscopic study).
Dorothy Hodgkin was a British chemist who developed protein crystallography, for which she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964. Her research led to the discovery of the structure of penicillin, vitamin B12 & insulin. (photo: Royal Society of Chemistry)
Hypatia was the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. She lived in Alexandria, Egypt around 400 AD & was known as a great teacher & wise counselor.
Rachel Carson was a marine biologist & conservationist who started her career at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She's the author of multiple books, including Silent Spring, which helped inspire the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency!
Samantha Cristoforetti is an Italian European Space Agency astronaut who holds the record for longest uninterrupted spaceflight of a European astronaut. She's the 1st Italian woman in space & is known as the first person who brewed an espresso in space!
Katsuko Saruhashi was a Japanese geochemist most well-known for her groundbreaking research on radioactive fallout. She was the 1st woman to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Tokyo.
Fran Allen is a computer scientist who was the 1st female IBM Fellow & the 1st woman to receive the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award (aka the "Nobel Prize of computing"). (photo: Rama, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr)
Mary Anning was a paleontologist in the early 1800s who became world renowned for Jurassic marine fossils she discovered in the cliffs along the English Channel & contributed to important changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life.
Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to fly in space! In 1963, she orbited the earth once every 88 minutes by operating her spacecraft manually. (photo: RIA Novosti archive)
Rosalind Franklin was a chemist best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA while at Kings College London, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix. (photo: personal collection of Jenifer Glynn)
Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who made important contributions to abstract algebra & theoretical physics. She was described by Albert Einstein as "the most significant creative mathematical genius" of her time.
Christine Darden is an American mathematician & aeronautical engineer who spent her career at NASA researching supersonic flight & sonic booms. She was the first black woman at NASA’s Langley Research Center to be promoted into the top rank in the federal civil service.
Shafi Goldwasser is a computer scientist and 1 of 3 women to win the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award (aka the "Nobel Prize of computing"). She's a professor at both MIT & Weizmann Institute in Israel, cofounder of Duality Technologies & director of the Simon Institute!
Sally Ride was the 1st American woman in space (3rd overall) & remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space (at the age of 32)!
Grace Hopper was a celebrated computer scientist who earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale before becoming a U.S. Navy rear admiral & one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer.
Marie Curie developed of the theory of radioactivity (a term that she coined). She was the 1st woman to win a Nobel Prize, the 1st person (& only woman!) to win twice, & the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences (#physics & #chemistry).
Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist who, as a postgraduate student at Cambridge University, co-discovered the first radio pulsars (rapidly spinning neutron stars formed in supernova explosions)! (photo: Daily Herald Archive / SSPL via Getty Images)
Florence Nightingale is widely known as the founder of modern nursing - International Nurses Day is celebrated on her birthday! - but was also gifted in mathematics and became a pioneer in the use of infographics and statistical graphics!