Posted on March 14th, 2022 at 1:37pm

March is Women’s History Month

In March, we're celebrating all of the incredible women who have influenced STEMM in our newsletters. The women highlighted in our newsletters so far include:

Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman in America to receive an MD (Geneva Medical College, NY) in 1849
Dr. Katharine Burr Blodgett, the first woman to earn a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge (1926), the first female scientist hired at the General Electric research lab (1918) and who developed the first system for creating non-reflecting glass (1938)
Dr. Roberta Bondar, Canada’s first female astronaut (1992) and the world’s first astronaut-neurologist
Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell who discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967 using a radio telescope she helped to build
Drs. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for developing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tools
Dr. Marie Curie, the first woman to earn her doctoral degree in France (1903) and the only woman in science to win the Nobel Prize in two separate fields (Physics, 1903 and Chemistry, 1911)
Dr. Rosalind Franklin, whose work on X-ray diffraction studies lead to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA
Dr. Gertrude B. Elion who helped develop the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine (1957)
Dr. Dorothy Hodgkin, the only British woman who has won a Nobel Prize in science (for her use of X-ray crystallography to examine the structure of biomolecules)
Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Hopper, known as the “Queen of Code,” best known for helping to create the first all-electronic digital computer, called UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer – NASA’s tracking stations for the Apollo moon missions used UNIVAC hardware to communicate with the astronauts), creating the first compiler which translates source code from one language into another, and was the oldest serving officer in the US armed forces when she retired from the Navy in 1986 (at the age of 79)
Dr. Mae C. Jemison, first African-American women to travel to space in 1992
Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan who were pioneering Black mathematicians whose work was critical to space exploration
Sister Mary Kenneth Keller known for creating the coding language BASIC
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron, who wrote the first computer algorithm published in 1843
Dr. Ruth L. Kirschstein, first woman appointed to lead an NIH institute when she became the NIGMS director (1974-1993)
Inge Lehman, who was the first scientist to theorize that apart from the outer molten core, Earth also has an inner solid core
Dr. Cora Marrett, NSF’s first Black female acting director (2013-2014)
Dr. Barbara McClintock, the only woman to have received, by herself, a Nobel Prize in Physiology (1983)
Vice Admiral Dr. Antonia Novello, first woman (and the first person of Hispanic heritage) to hold the office of Surgeon General of the United States at the time she was appointed by President George Bush in 1990
Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, first person to receive a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University in 1925 and first woman to head a department at Harvard as the Chair of the Department of Astronomy (1956-1960)
Dr. Sally Ride, the youngest American astronaut and first American woman to travel to space in 1983
Dr. Florence Seibert, who developed a system to purify a protein from TB bacteria that became the international standard for TB testing in 1940 (it is still in use today)
Dr. Nettie Stevens, who is known for discovering the XY sex-determination system (1905)
Dr. Lydia Villa-Komaroff, who helped to discover how bacterial cells could be utilized to generate insulin and helped find a molecule responsible for the degeneration of brain cells in Alzheimer’s disease (she also co-founded The Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science, SACNAS
Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, who developed the process of separating uranium metal into Uranium-235 and Uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion (she was also the first woman to serve as president of the American Physical Society)

We celebrate these and the many other women who have made and are making STEMM history today!