Mary Lowe Good took a public stand as an advocate of science and technology in society. Her advocacy earned her appointments to the National Science Board, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and the Department of Commerce.
In her lab at MIT she creates technologies so small that you cannot see them with most microscopes—until they save a soldier’s life on the battlefield or illuminate light bulbs using stored solar power.
With just two employees, a master brewer’s certificate, and her father’s blessing, Mazumdar-Shaw began a business specializing in industrial enzymes for food and textile makers that now reaches around the globe.
An ambitious teenaged Uma Chowdhry (1947–2024) left her home in India to study physics and engineering in the United States. But after falling in love with chemistry, particularly materials science, the study of solids at the molecular level, Chowdhry decided to work in industrial research.
Alice Hamilton promoted “industrial medicine” and laws to protect employees from dangerous substances in the workplace.
In 1978, more than 100 years after its founding, the American Chemical Society (ACS), one of the world’s largest scientific organizations, elected a woman as its leader for the very first time. Anna Jane Harrison had served as a chemistry professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts since 1945.
The heavy elements, which include plutonium, are hard to produce and exist only briefly, yet one woman has dedicated her career to capturing and analyzing them, making important discoveries about the nature of nuclear fission.
American biochemist and pharmacologist,who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Pioneering molecular biologist, influential science administrator, and leader in science policy and advocacy.
Her simple, rapid method for assessing newborn viability, the “Apgar score,” has long been standard practice.