Dorothy M. Hoover was a pioneer in the field of aeronautical mathematics and physics. The granddaughter of enslaved people, she overcame the significant obstacles facing African American women in the Jim Crow era of the twentieth century to earn advanced degrees in mathematics and physics.
1800s Irish Sister of Mercy, foundress, Crimean war nurse, and teacher
Match Group engineer and CEO
Dr. Wendy Freedman was the lead author on the 2001 paper “Final Results from the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant;” Freedman and her team had calculated more precisely than ever before the rate at which the universe is expanding, or the Hubble constant.
Dr. Lina Stern faced the dual barriers of being a woman and being Jewish but nevertheless was able to become a groundbreaking researcher who introduced the scientific community to the barrière hématoencéphalique—the blood-brain barrier.
Digital artist and author of one of the first web design textbooks in 1996
Helen Gwynne-Vaughan was an acclaimed mycologist, King’s College graduate, and Head of the Botany Department (as well as first female professor) at Birkbeck College long before she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War I, and was made chief controller of the women deployed to France.
Dr Helen Hobbs fundamentally changed the way we understand cholesterol, doing work that would save countless people from death and disability related to issues like heart disease and stroke.
A 1929 earthquake led Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann to theorize (correctly) about the structure of the Earth’s core
“Janet Rowley’s work established that cancer is a genetic disease. She demonstrated that mutations in critical genes lead to specific forms of leukemia and lymphoma, and that one can determine the form of cancer present in a patient directly from the genetic changes in the cancer. We are still working from her paradigm.”