Introductions Necessary

Born in Quebec City to a Chinese immigrant family, Joanne Liu decided to become a pediatrician at an early age.  She became the international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) (aka Doctors without Borders) in 2013.

Wanting to provide inspiration to young people that also might not been encouraged to pursue math and science as careers NASA scientist Valerie Thomas was a mentor to youths through Science Mathematics Aerospace Research and Technology and the National Technical Association.

Dr. Mary Letitia Caldwell was the first female member of the senior faculty in chemistry at Columbia University, and developed a method for isolating crystalline pancreatic enzymes.

Émilie du Châtelet was the daughter of a member of the court of France’s King Louis XIV and she was a physicist, natural philosopher, and mathematician whose work is still celebrated today.

At a time when less than 1% of engineers employed in the United States were women, Beatrice Hicks forged her own path and then helped to usher in the next generations of engineering women.

Dr. Elinor Ostrom was a political scientist and economist that was also a  lead researcher at the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program, managed by Virginia Tech, where she worked on one of the programs long term research projects focusing her work on how communities manage their common lands and natural resources including pastures, forests, and lakes.

For her work on the discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain, Dr. May-Britt Moser shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2014.

Dr. Ada Yonath has spent her career pioneering the use of the field of crystallography to map the structures of ribosomes.

As a graduate student Dr. Carol Greider was studying molecular biology at the University of California Santa Barbara in the laboratory of Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn.   In 2009, she and Blackburn shared the Nobel Prize in medicine.

DNA is what makes you – you. It contains the genetic code for all the cells in your body that are used to make your entire system.  In 1980, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn published her first findings about the molecular nature of telomeres showing that they actually contain a particular DNA, and her work eventually led her to win a Nobel Prize.