Introductions Necessary

Dr. Sheila Widnall has spent the majority of her career balancing research, teaching, and public service.  She was the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force and was the first woman to head a branch of the military.

Inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame in 2009, Dr. Mildred Cohn has also been awarded the National Medal of Science.

Since 2014 Dr. Joanna Haigh has been the co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College.

Stricken by polio at the age of three, Dr. Florence Seibert turned to academics because she couldn’t go out and play like other children.  In her career, she helped improve and standardize the tests for tuberculous.

Dr. Mildred Dresselhaus, known as the Queen of Carbon Chemistry, has been a trailblazer since her early days.

Dr. Chiaki Mukai was already an established cardiac surgeon when she became the first Japanese woman to go to space.

Dr. Nettie Stevens career as a geneticist wasn’t very long, lasting only about 11 years, but in that short time she was able to make huge strides in understanding genetic traits.

Engineer, artist, and inventor Ayah Bdeir has focused her career on democratizing hardware to make education and innovation more accessible.

When it was suggested that Marie Curie’s husband had actually been the one to discover the element radium Hertha Ayrton, a friend and colleague, quickly and publicly came to Curie’s defense stating, “errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.” And she would know as she often faced the same misattribution of credit being given to her husband.

Mary Walker trained as a surgeon, volunteered for the Union Army in the Civil War, and is the only woman to have been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.