International Day of Women and Girls In Science.

Caroline Hershel Sister of William Herschel, Caroline was also an astronomer. Her father gave her an education himself, though her mother did not approve.  Her physical appearance had been marred by smallpox and typhus as a child, so her brother William showed her there was more to life than being a maid just because she probably would never marry. By her brother’s side, she aided in his observations and performed complex calculations. With Caroline’s help, William discovered Uranus in 1781. She began to make observations herself and became the first woman to discover a comet in 1786. In total, she discovered six comets and three nebulae and earned many awards for her contributions to astronomy.  

Lise Meitner For three decades, Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn worked together in researching radioactivity and they even discovered the element protactinium together. However, she had to flee Germany and leave Hahn in the 1930s. She offered the first explanation for tremendous amounts of energy that would be produced during nuclear fission. Hahn then wrote a paper based on that idea, but did not credit Meitner. Without that credit, Meitner was excluded when Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944. However, her contributions were not unnoticed by others in the field, particularly Niels Bohr. Bohr not only helped Meitner escape the Nazis in Berlin until she reached safety in Sweden, but he also promoted her among the physics community and would nominate her for a Nobel Prize on three separate occasions. Albert Einstein hailed Meitner as “our Madame Curie” and a pioneer in physics. 

Emmy Noether When Emmy Noether earned her doctorate, she graduated with honors. However, she had troubles finding a job in academia who would pay her, though she finally found a position at her alma mater, the University of Göttingen.  Amalie Emmy Noether was born in Germany on March 23, 1882. She taught at the University of Göttingen until the Nazi regime dismissed all Jewish professors. Noether then moved to Bryn Mawr College in the U.S. Her groundbreaking work in abstract algebra and theoretical physics led to concepts like "Noether's Theorem," "Noetherian rings," and "Noetherian induction." Inspired by Einstein’s work, she crafted a theorem that had incredible importance in explaining symmetry in nature as well as universal laws of contributions. The “Noether’s theorem” was also used to help search for the Higgs boson and other significant discoveries in physics. Emmy Noether has been described by many (including Einstein) as the foremost mathematician in History. Einstein considered her a genius.

Women and Girls in Science

Marie Skłodowska-Curie The only person in history to win two Nobel prizes in two sciences: Physics and Quemistry. Physics for her work and her husband’s work on radioactivity. In Chemistry for discovering the two elements, polonium and radium. She named one of the elements polonium after her homeland Poland. She named the other radium, because it gave off such strong rays.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell While working as a postgrad, Jocelyn Bell Burnell observed radio pulsars for the first time. Despite being the first one to actually see them, she was passed over when the discovery was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974. Instead, it went to her advisor and another colleague. Though many expressed outrage over Bell’s omission, she never expressed any disappointment on the matter publicly. However, she is still credited as the person who made one of the most important discoveries of the century in physics. Later, Bell worked as a physics professor at Open University in the UK and at Princeton. She continued to work in academia up until her retirement, receiving a host of other awards and honorary degrees along the way

Valentina Tereshkova. Who was she? The first woman In Space She became the first woman in space in 1963, onboard the Vostok 6 as part of the Cosmonaut Corps. Not only did she go into space, but she actually piloted the vessel. Her mission in space lasted just under 72 hours and included 48 orbits around the Earth.  Following her time in space, you earned a doctorate in engineering and eventually entered politics where she used your position to advocate for space exploration, particularly for women.

Rita Levi-Montalcini Though her father believed her place was in the home, not in a lab, Rita Levi-Montalcini earned a degree in medicine. Though Mussolini’s Manifesto of Race prevented Levi- Montalcini from obtaining a job due to her Jewish heritage, she constructed a laboratory in her bedroom and continued her research anyway. She served as a surgeon in WWII ( the Second World War), and returned to dedicate her time to academics. She became a professor at Washington University and set up research labs in St. Louis and Rome. She received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work with tumor cells and isolating Nerve Growth Factor. She retired in 1977, but she spent the rest of her life advocating for science until her death in 2012.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Though Cecilia completed her studies at Cambridge in the 1920s, degrees were not given to women. She later travelled to America where she received her Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe University. Her thesis was hailed as “undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy. he became the first person to determine that stars are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, though she was pressured into retraction by a colleague who then arrived at the same conclusion a few years later. Her life was spent in academia at Harvard, where she continued to advocate for science and became a role model for women wanting to enter astrophysics.

Jane Goodall Jane Goodall was a pioneering English primatologist Her methods of studying animals in the wild, which emphasized patient observation over long periods of time of both social groups and individual animals, changed not only how chimpanzees as a species are understood, but also how studies of many different kinds of animals are carried out. When Goodall was about two years old her mother gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee, which Goodall still possesses to this day

ROSALIND FRANKLIN Rosalind Elsie Franklin was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely recognized posthumously. Franklin was never nominated for a Nobel Prize. Her work was a crucial part in the discovery of DNA, for which Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1962.