Introductions Necessary

Dr. Adelaide de Almeida is an associate professor of physics at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil who studies radiation and dosimetry.

Born in Punjab, India, Dr. Kalpana Chawla was always interested in flying.  Three years after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen, she was among the 15th class of potential astronauts and she was the first Indian-American women to travel to space.

Dr. Judith Vaitukaitis jokes that if her name had gone on the product created as a result of her research no one would be able to pronounce it.  That product was the first home pregnancy test.

November 17 is World Prematurity Day, and today we would like to introduce you to Dr. Helen Mintz-Hittner, an opthomologist researching treatments for retinopathy of prematurity, or ROP.

Dr. Michelle Thaller is the Deputy Director of Science Communications at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as well as being an astronomer that studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars.

At her first research position physicist Dr. Lise Meitner wasn’t allowed to work in the lab “lest her hair catch on fire.” She would face sexism throughout her career but would co-discover a new element and the process of nuclear fission–a discovery that her male research partner would receive a Noble prize for while she was denied this honor due to her gender and Jewish heritage.

Recipient of a National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2009 Helen Murray Free also served as a president of the American Chemical Society and is known for the development of self-testing systems for those diagnosed with diabetes.

One of Dr. “Tilly” Edinger’s major findings was the evidence that evolution was a branching process where structures could evolved independently leading to the modern understanding of cladogenesis.

In the archives of the Byrd Polar Climate Research Center at Ohio State University you can find papers and over 18,0000 slides documenting the research of Dr. Lois M Jones, leader of the first all-women Antarctica scientific expedition.

It was while Grace Hopper was working on the Mark II that a popular story about a moth shorting out a relay and Hopper making a comment about this “computer bug” started being circulated, and the moth can actually be found attached to the research log book.