Lisa Perez Jackson: A Life in Balance

Lisa Perez Jackson was adopted as an infant and grew up in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward in the 1960s. The area was a vibrant center of African American culture with a high rate of home-ownership. Her father was a postman and Navy veteran who took great pride in serving his community and his dedication to the public good was passed on to his daughter. As a child in Louisiana, Lisa noticed that pollution deregulation helped the wealthy make more money but it was harsh for the poor who lived near waterways and canals fouled by the oil industry. She came to realize that environmentalism and equality were entwined and that people of color were most likely to bear the burden of environmental degradation. In her own words, “environmental challenges have the power to deny equality of opportunity and hold back the progress of communities.”

Katherine Dexter McCormick; Godmother to the birth control pill

Katharine Dexter was the first woman to get a science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in biology in 1904. The curriculum was research heavy and besides the demanding work, she had to petition the college twice—once for permission to work in chemistry laboratories without a hat and again to be allowed to wear a shorter skirt. The reason for the later—she didn’t want her dress to drag across the unclean floors.  Her plan was to go into medicine.

Rosalind Franklin

If you have as much as heard of ‘DNA’, the name Rosalind Franklin should be synonymous with it. This pioneering scientist played a crucial role in solving one of the great scientific questions of her time, and unfortunately did not live long enough to be given her due.

Rosalind Franklin was a British scientist born in the 20th Century. She graduated with a degree in Chemistry from Cambridge (where she witnessed the appointment of its first ever woman professor Dorothy Garrod), and later joined King’s College, London, where she worked on X-ray crystallography of DNA crystals. It was a time when the greatest minds in Biology and Chemistry were working on one elusive question: what is the structure of DNA? This was particularly important because DNA is the molecule responsible for carrying genetic information; knowledge of its structure would help us understand how this genetic information is carried across generations.

Mary Somerville: A Passion for Science

Mary Somerville was born in Scotland on Dec. 26, 1780, and had four supreme passions in her life: her family, equality for women, science, and birds.

Described as feminine in manner and appearance, as a girl she never cared for dolls. Her mother said she would have been content if Mary had “only learnt to write well and keep accounts which was all that a woman was expected to know.” Mary, however, had a talent for mathematics. She taught herself by listening in on her brother as he was tutored in geometry and by reading Euclid.

Annie Jump Cannon

She Filled the Sky: The Awesome Astronomy of Annie Jump Cannon

This week’s post you get an awesome cartoon  by the fab Dale DeBakcsy from the Illustrated Women in Science series at MadArtLab in addition to the usual written profile! Enjoy!

 

350,000 stars classified. It’s one of astronomy’s unbreakable and frankly not even approachable records, the scientific equivalent of the Ripken Streak. Seven hours a day, six days a week, for forty-four years, one woman bent herself to the task of creating an ultimate chart of the night sky, with each star classified not only by position, but by surface temperature and spectral signature. Hunched over a magnifying glass, she could categorize three stars a minute where others might take three minutes to categorize one star. She was astronomy’s Iron Woman – Annie Jump Cannon.

Dame Stephanie Shirley

Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley is one of the most remarkable living sheroes of our time, having created a multibillion dollar business that also established a new way to bring women into the workforce.

Although Shirley made her fame and fortune in England, she began her life in the industrial city of Dortmund, Germany in 1933 as Vera Buchthal, the daughter of a Jewish judge and a non-Jewish Viennese mother. Her father lost his position as the Nazi’s began their systematic persecution of Jews and other minorities, and by July 1939 Vera’s parents placed her and her older sister on the Kindertransport, an organized evacuation effort that took 10,000 mostly Jewish children out of Europe to Britain nine months before World War II broke out. The five year-old Vera said goodbye to her parents in Vienna and took the train to begin a new life in the UK.

Julia Morgan

Julia Morgan was a groundbreaking female architect who worked on over 700 buildings during her epic career, paving the way for women in a male-dominated profession.

Julia was born to a wealthy family in San Francisco 1872. She was the second of 5 children and excelled at maths at an early age, encouraged by her mother. When she was still young she met her mother’s cousin, the architect Pierre Le Bron, who sparked in her the desire to become an architect too.

Margaret Hamilton – One Giant Leap for Womankind

Nearly fifty years ago, Neil Armstrong took his famous first small step on the surface of the moon. Though people all over the US celebrated the monumental historical moment, arguably none were more excited or relieved than Margaret Hamilton, who led the MIT team responsible for the software that made a moon landing possible. Hamilton’s innovation and accomplishments helped pave the way for women in computer science disciplines during a Mad Men like era where women were a huge minority in the field.

Emmy Noether – “The most important woman in the history of mathematics”

This post is an edited version of a post which originally appeared on the wonderful Saints, Sisters and Sluts blog (which you should definitely check out!)

“Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”  ~ Albert Einstein

Emmy Noether made ground-breaking contributions to theoretical physics and abstract algebra. She developed several formulations to support Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, in fact he wrote to David Hilbert, “You know that Frl. Noether is continually advising me in my projects and that it is really through her that I have become competent in the subject.”

Marie M Daly

Marie Maynard Daly overcame racial & gender barriers to become the first African American woman to earn a PhD in Chemistry before embarking on a career in medical science that changed the way we understand the human body.

Marie was born in 1921 in Queens, New York. She was the oldest child and only girl in her family. She got her love of science from her dad. When he was a young man he wanted to be a scientist and had earned a scholarship to study science at Cornell University. Despite the scholarship he couldn’t afford his room & board and so sadly he was forced to drop out. Marie later said, “My father wanted to become a scientist but there weren’t opportunities for him as a black man at that time.” Instead he became a postal worker and worked hard to provide for his family.