Women in Science
Feminist Friday Posts
Jemison is an American engineer, physician, and astronaut from Chicago. She studies both engineering and medical research, particularly computer programming, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and computer magnetic disc production.
Jemison was the first African-American female astronaut in space! She was one of 15 candidates chosen from a field of more than 2,000 and was appointed the science mission specialist. Her first mission was aboard the Endeavour on mission STS47 in September 1992 for eight days where she conducted experiments on weightlessness.
Jemison received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University in 1977, as well as having completed the requirements for a B.A in African and Afro-American Studies. She then received a doctorate degree in medicine from Cornell in 1981. Jemison also served in the Peace Corps, founded a company researching the application of technology in daily life, has been an actress on several television shows including Star Trek, is a dancer, and holds nine honorary doctorates! She also speaks Russian, Swahili, and Japanese.
Jemison says Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. inspired her to think of attitude and audacity and spoke of a call to action on fulfilling a dream. When asked how to fight for civil rights and break down barriers to human potential, she says “the best way to make dreams come true is to wake up.”
Mae C. Jemison (1956–Present)
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Gilliam is a professor of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Pediatrics, the Vice Provost for Academic Leadership, Advancement, and Diversity, the Ellen H. Block Professor of Health Justice and a member of the National Academy of Medicine to name a few!
As a physician, Gilliam focuses on the gynecological needs of girls and young women, with an emphasis on youth of color and sexual minorities.
Gilliam received a B.A. in English Literature from Yale, an M.A. in politics from Oxford, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.
Melissa Gilliam (UChicago Professor)
Vera Cooper Rubin (1928-2016)
Rubin was an American astronomer who noticed a discrepancy in galactic rotation that we now consider evidence for dark matter!
Rubin earned a B.A. in astronomy in 1948 but was turned down from graduate school at Princeton because the Astronomy Department would not accept women (for 27 more years!). Rubin earned a masters degree from Cornell and a PhD from Georgetown. Later in life, Rubin earned honorary doctorates from Yale, Harvard, Smith, Grinnell, and Princeton.
Rita Levi-Montalcini (1910-2012)
Levi-Montalcini was an Italian neurologist awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, jointly with Stanley Cohen, for the discovery of nerve growth factor.
Nerve growth factor is a biomolecule neuropeptide involved in the regulation of growth, maintenance, proliferation, and survival of specific neurons. Levi-Montalcini’s isolated the nerve growth factor by transferring cancerous tissues from cancerous tumors to chicken embryos then observing the resultant abnormally rapid growth of nerve cells.
Levi-Montalcini attended the University of Turin Medical School and graduated summa cum laude M.D. She then worked in the anatomy department until Jews were barred from university positions during WWII. Levi-Montalcini continued her research from home while fleeing from the German army before ending up in the lab of Professor Hamburger at Washington University in St. Louis. She also directed the Research Center of Neurobiology in Rome, the Laboratory of Cellular Biology, and the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research.
Her Awards and Honors are numerous and include being elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, granted the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University, and the National Medal of Science.
Goeppert-Mayer was a German-American theoretical physicist awarded the Nobel prize in Physics for the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus.
Goeppert-Mayer proposed a mathematical model of the atom where nucleons were distributed in shells corresponding to different energy levels. This would explain why certain ‘magic numbers’ of nucleons in the atomic nucleus lead to especially stable nuclei.
Goeppert-Mayer began at the University of Göttingen with an interest in mathematics before being drawn to physics, especially (then new) quantum mechanics. She received her doctorate in theoretical physics and moved to America with her husband. There she worked unpaid at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia, Sarah Lawrence College, and on the Manhattan Project during WWII before starting work at the University of Chicago where she developed her mathematic model of the atomic shell. “This was the first place where she was not considered a nuisance, but greeted with open arms. She was suddenly a Professor in the Physics Department and in the Institute for Nuclear Studies.” She was later employed by Argonne National Laboratory and began to learn nuclear physics.
Goeppert-Mayer was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has a unit for two-photon absorption cross section named after her doctoral thesis on the possibility of two-photon absorption (a GM unit equals 10^−50 cm^4 s photon^−1), and also has an award in her name offered by the American Physical Society to honour young female physicists who hold PhDs.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906–1972)
Maud Menten (1879-1960)
Menten was a Canadian biochemical and medical researcher who worked on one of the fundamental concepts in enzyme kinetics: the Michaelis-Menten equation.
Menten worked on enzyme kinetics, specifically on modeling and predicting the rates of enzyme-driven reactions. She expressed the relationship between enzymes, substrates, and substrate coefficients in the later named Michaelis-Menten equation.
Menten got her Masters from the University of Toronto before moving to the US for research opportunities available to women. She returned to Canada and became one of the first Canadian women to receive a Doctor of Medicine degree (similar to a Ph.D.). She then moved to Germany in 1912 where she worked with Michaelis before moving back to the US and receiving a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Chicago in 1916. After graduating, she studied histochemistry and pediatric pathology at the University of Pittsburgh then became a professor in 1948. When she retired, she returned to Canada to conduct cancer research at the British Columbia Medical Research Institute.
In addition to her career achievements, Menten was an accomplished musician, artist, linguist, and member of an Arctic expedition!
Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and orator from Alexandria. As the head of the Neoplatonic school, she taught philosophy and astronomy and was one of the world's leading mathematicians and astronomers. She was the first female teacher and highly respected by her peers; instead of marrying, she devoted her life to learning and teaching.
As a mathematician, Hypatia described the division of cones by planes and developed the terms hyperbola, parabola, and ellipse in her work On the Conics of Apollonius. As an astronomer, Hypatia worked on the astrolabe and contributed to Ptolemy's geocentric model of the world. As a philosopher, Hypatia was a Neoplatonist who studied the work of Plotinus, an expositor of the doctrines of Plato, and focused on the difference between everyday reality and the reality partially accessible via intellectual abstraction from the Platonic Forms. For this, she was viewed as pagan and murdered by Christian zealots in the streets of Alexandria.
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Hypatia was the first female and last academic at the University of Alexandria before it was sacked and burned. She stood for intellectual value, rigorous mathematics, the embodiment of mind, and the voice of temperance and moderation.
Hypatia (355-415)
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Hopper, also known as “Amazing Grace”, was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. Hopper was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1991, becoming the first female individual recipient of the honor. She was also the first American woman to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
Hopper wanted to expand the field of programming with tools that were both programmer-friendly and application-friendly. She believed computer code could be written in English by using a programming language based on English words and a compiler that would convert that language into machine code to be read by the computer. This led her team to create the first compiler in 1952, and later COBOL, one of the first programming languages.
Hopper received a B.A in Math and Physics at Vassar and was one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale. After receiving her doctorate, she taught math at Vassar until joining the Navy in 1943. She was assigned to the programming staff for the Mark I computer at Harvard and stayed at Harvard as a research fellow until the 1950s.
Hopper’s legacy includes the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (GHC) and the Grace Murray Hopper Award. The GHC is a series of conferences that focus on research and careers in computing for women and is one of the world’s largest gathering of women in computing.
Hopper’s famous anecdote is the discovery of a live moth in a circuit causing a glitch in the computer. She is said to have joked that they “debugged” the early computer by removing the moth, leading to the common use of that phrase in computer science.
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906-1992)
