Download Famous Women in Science and Engineering

Beatrice Hicks
 Received degrees in both chemical and electrical
engineering, as well as in physics
 One of the founding members and first president of
Society of Women Engineers
 first woman engineer hired by Western Electric Co,
where she developed environment sensing devices
before working on quality control devices
Gertrude B. Elion
 Won the Nobel Prize in 1988 for Physiology/Medicine
 Developed many drugs, such as those that treated
AIDS, leukemia, gout, malaria, meningitis, and others
 First woman to be inducted into the National
Inventers Hall of Fame
Sally Ride
 First American woman to enter space
 Worked for NASA. Also one of the
developers of the robotic arm, which
was then used in a space mission
 In National Women’s Hall of Fame
 Now President and CEO of Sally Ride
Science, which promotes science to
middle school-aged children
Elizabeth Blackwell
 First female doctor in the USA, and first female on the
UK medical register
 Opened her own practice and trained many nurses for
the Civil War
 Later opened the Women’s Medical College in
England, along with Florence Nightingale
Marie Curie
 The “Mother of Modern Physics”
 Studied radioactivity and isolated Polonium and
Radium
 First woman awarded a PhD in research science in
Europe, as well as the first female professor at the
Sorbonne University in Paris
 Also the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize (in
Physics and Chemistry)
Grace Murray Hopper
 Developed the COBOL programming language,
 Also developed the first computer compiler and
was one of the first programmers of the Harvard
Mark I computer
 Created the term “debugging”
 first woman Admiral in US Navy
 USS Hopper is named after her
Lillian Gilbreth
 First PhD awardee in Industrial Psychology,
which allowed her to work with engineers to
design products
 She was also the first female engineering
professor at Perdue
 Second woman in the Society of Mechanical
Engineers, and the first honorary member
of the Society of Women Engineers
 “Cheaper by the Dozen” is based on her and
her family’s life
Rosalind Franklin
 X-ray crystallographer whose work was
key in the discovery that DNA was a
double helix
 Also worked on the structure of RNA
and how it affects cells
 Researched the Tobacco Mosaic Virus
and the Polio virus
Annie Jump Cannon
 Studied astronomy and physics
 Astronomer most famous for designing the
contemporary start classification system
 Also organized stars by their temperature, the first to
do so
 Discovered over 300 stars in her lifetime