25 Women In STEM You Should Know About
Here’s the list, read the article fore more details:
- Sally Ride, Physicist, Former NASA Astronaut
- Red Burns, Godmother of Silicon Alley
- Missy Cummings, Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT
- Caterina Fake, Flickr Co-Founder
- Maria Klawe, President, Harvey Mudd College
- Susan Helms, Active Duty Commander, 14th Air Force, Commander, Joint Functional Component Command for Space, former NASA Astronaut
- Lucy Bradshaw, Senior Vice President, Electronic Arts
- Ingrid Daubechies, President, International Mathematical Union
- Sara de Freitas, Director of Research, Serious Games Institute
- Helen Grenier, Co-Founder, iRobot
- Antonia Coello Novello, Surgeon General of the United States
- Susan Landau, Visiting Scholar, Harvard University
- Kari Byron, Mythbusters co-host
- Esther Takeuchi, Prolific Inventor
- Jill Tarter, Astronomer, Director, Center for SETI Research at SETI Institute
- Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Director, Regulation of Retroviral Infections Division, Pasteur Institute
- Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook
- Svetlana Savitskaya, Deputy Chair, Committee on Defense, Former Russian Cosmonaut
- Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Location and Local Services, Google
- Mary Lou Jepsen, Founder, Pixel Qi
- Ruzena Bajcsy, Professor of Electrical Engineering and ComputerScience, University of California, Berkeley
- Mamta Patel Nagaraja, Project Manager, Women@NASA
- Ada Yonath, Director, Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly, Weizmann Institute of Science
- Mildred Dresselhaus, Institute Professor, Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, MIT
- Elisabeth Pate-Cornell, Professor, Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University
To add to the 3 visible women of color on this list of 25, in no particular order:
Adriana C. Ocampo Uria, Planetary Scientist, Program Executive for the NASA HQ Science Mission Directorate
In 1989, while examining satellite images of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, Ocampo Uria spotted the 130-mile-wide Chicxulub crater—the scar left behind by the asteroid impact that may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. She continues to study the crater “to understand how this event could have not only caused a mass extinction but also how it affected the evolution of life.”
Margaret A. Liu, Vice Chair of the International Vaccine Institute
HIV mutates so quickly that it can outmaneuver traditional vaccines made from viral proteins or weakened viruses. Worse, a vaccine made from a weakened virus could prove deadly if the virus mutated and regained virulence. Liu’s work has shown that DNA may offer “the hope of better, more stable vaccines that can be rapidly produced.” DNA injected as a vaccine might signal the body to churn out proteins that protect against HIV by provoking an immune response to the virus.
Reina Reyes, Astrophysicist, Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
Leading a Princeton University research team, she proved Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity on a cosmic scale at the age of 26. …They showed how galaxies up to 3.5 billion light years away are clustered together in exactly the way General Relativity predicts. They came up with a new astronomical measurement, which indicates how galaxies are pulled together by gravity, just as Einstein theorized.
Shirley Ann Jackson, Physicist, President at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The second African American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in physics, Jackson says her science education informed her work as an administrator, first as chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now at Rensselaer: “I was educated to address complex problems by having an intuition about the answer and by learning to break the problems down into parts that can more easily be solved. So I view myself as both a visionary and a pragmatist.”
Flossie Wong-Staal, Virologist and Molecular Biologist, Chief Scientific Officer at iTherX Pharmaceuticals
Wong-Staal and her colleagues were the first to clone HIV-1 and create a map of its genes, which led to a test for the virus [along with being part of the team to discover HIV as a cause of AIDS in 1983]. Today she looks for new drugs to fight AIDS and other diseases. Her most recent strategy for combating HIV focuses on understanding genes in humans that help the virus enter cells and successfully infect a host. Attacking HIV directly has failed, she says, “because the virus is a moving target and can readily develop resistance.”
Norma Clayton, Engineer, Vice President for Learning, Training and Development at The Boeing Company
…She led the [Boeing’s] Global Sourcing Initiative, one of four enterprise-wide initiatives launched in 2006 to increase growth and productivity. She also held a number of leadership roles within Integrated Defense Systems, including vice president of Supplier Management and Procurement, responsible for all subcontract and procurement matters involving policymaking and implementation, subcontract oversight, and process improvement. She also served as vice president and general manager of the Maintenance and Modification Centers for Integrated Defense Systems. In that role, she had overall responsibility for the large aircraft modification center in San Antonio, and tactical aircraft modification centers Arizona and Florida. Norma joined McDonnell Douglas in 1995 as director of the Machining Center, and later became division director of Fabrication in St. Louis. Before joining McDonnell Douglas, she held leadership roles in manufacturing, supply chain management, program management and plant operations at Lockheed Martin, General Electric, RCA and General Motors.
I could go on.
