Taking advantage of Women’s History Month to call out a handful of smart, bold, persistent women who were trailblazers in science, many of them overlooked until after their death. We’re all indebted to them and hundreds others like them.
1. Shien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) – Chinese-American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and helped develop the process for breaking uranium into its isotopes.
2. Jean Purdy (1945-1985) – A British nurse and embryologist. Her work led to the first IVF baby in 1978. Until 2015, the plaque displayed in the hospital honoring the event only included the names of her male colleagues.
3. Janaki Ammal (1897-1984) – Indian botanist who rejected a planned marriage and developed Indian sugarcane hybrids that now enable that country’s huge sugarcane industry.
4. Vera Danchakoff (1879-unknown) – The first woman professor in Russia who was the first to describe stem cells in 1916.
5. Phyllis Bolds (1932-2018) – African American physicist who spent career studying aircraft vibrations and flight dynamics and tutoring STEM students.
