1978 National Inventor of the Year (US) Barbara Askins waited until her children were in school to finish her chemistry Bachelors and Masters degrees, then went on to work for NASA, developing a new way to process film using radioactive materials. The astronomical and geological images she worked on held much more detail, making them significantly more valuable to scientists, and her process was also applied to x-rays and restoration of old photos.
1600s French chemist who published La Chymie Charitable et Facile, en Faveur des Dames (Easy Chemistry for Women)
Fang, who lived during the first century BCE, was the earliest recorded woman alchemist in China. She reputedly discovered a way to turn mercury into silver—one interpretation is that she used a chemical technique to extract silver from ores using mercury.
A novelist and scientist, her efforts went beyond translation of English works into her native French—she also added her own commentary, which pushed her writing from the acceptable to the unacceptable for women of the 1700s, particularly given her interest in the sciences.
Biochemist Barbara Low discovered the elemental components of penicillin that enabled mass production and conversion into other antibiotic compounds. Until then, the life-saving drug had not been successfully synthesised.
Rocket scientist Yvonne Brill did brilliant work in rocket propulsion and invented the electrothermal hydrazine thruster (used in controlling satellites), improving both engine performance and propulsion reliability.
Chemist Agnes Pockels would have studied the subject if she were given the chance, but women were not admitted to universities in 1870s Germany.
Clarice Phelps was a nuclear engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope Reactor when, in 2008, she helped isolate and purify 22mg of berkelium, which collaborators used to create a new element: tennessine, element 117.
The first known female chemist in Sweden
The first woman in Germany to earn a PhD in chemistry