The Women In Science Archive

Electronic engineer Joy Lim Arthur was born 90 years ago today in Manila, traveling to the United States in the 1950s for college. After graduation, she spent her career working for the US Army on methods to protect soldiers from electronic warfare.

#WomenInSTEM #Engineering 🧪🔌

Christine Ladd-Franklin and the Color Wars of the Late Nineteenth Century. Color is among the most familiar of our sensations, and at the same time also one of the most foreign. Whereas any child can tell you that Big Bird is yellow, any philosophy major can just as easily p...

Psychologist Christine Ladd-Franklin was born 178 years ago today. Her 1892 paper, "A New Theory of Light Sensation", used her observation of the frequency of different types of color blindness to create an evolutionary explanation of how humans perceive light.

tinyurl.com/3exnu68n

#WomenInSTEM 🧪

Wishing a happy 49th birthday to Italian radio astronomer Marta Burgay, who was head of the team that, in 2003, discovered the first double pulsar, PSR J0737−3039! Asteroid 198634 Burgaymarta is named in her honor.

#WomenInSTEM #AstroSky 🧪🔭

Pharmaceutical chemist Mildred Rebstock was born 106 years ago today. In 1947, she and her team became the first to fully synthesize an antibiotic, chloromycetin, which was then extensively used to treat typhoid fever and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

#WomenInSTEM #ChemSky #MedSky 🧪⚕️⚛️

Looking for gifts to feel good about buying? All of our founder Dale DeBakcsy's books are available direct from the publisher, and all proceeds go to keeping the Archive free for everyone to access!

In the USA: tinyurl.com/33r6net5
In Great Britain: tinyurl.com/y6fsvp47

#BookSky #WomenInSTEM 🧪🎹

Wishing a happy 85th birthday to science fiction writer Jean Lorrah - her Star Trek novels highlighted her core values of curiosity, selflessness, an appreciation for diversity, and scientific devotion. Untold numbers became scientists growing up on books like these.

#BookSky #SciFi #WomenInSTEM 📖🧪

Wishing a happy 77th birthday to physical chemist Keiko Nishikawa. Her 250+ papers have included research on supercritical fluids, ionic plastic crystals, inhomogeneous mixing, and the behavior of ionic liquids. She has received the Saruhashi Prize (1998) & Japanese Medal.

#WomenInSTEM #ChemSky 🧪⚛️

Developmental psychologist Jacqueline Goodnow was born 101 years ago today. She conducted studies on how the perception of a reward's nature affects behavior, and on how cognitive test results differ across cultures, and wrote a series of psych books in the 1970s and 80s.

#WomeninSTEM #PsychSky 🧪

The forgotten women of quantum physics Physics has a reputation for being dominated by men, especially a century ago, as quantum physics was just being invented – but there have been so many women who helped shaped the field since its inception

Physics has a reputation for being dominated by men, especially a century ago, as quantum physics was just being invented – but there have been so many women who helped shaped the field since its inception

Outwitting the Predators: Elizabeth Bernays and the Hectic Lives of Plant-Eating Insects. Being a bug is a chancy thing. From the moment your egg is laid, you are the target of a vast array of predators hungry for your gushy, nutritive innards. Chances are, you will never make it out of yo...

New inductee to the Archive! Today we tell the story of entomologist Elizabeth Bernays, who was an expert on locust feeding cycles and the originator of the tritrophic model of co-evolution between plants, herbivores, and predators.

tinyurl.com/59r3sfep

#WomenInSTEM #Entomology #BugSky 🧪🐛

Wishing a happy 82nd birthday to biochemist Margaret Tolbert, whose research included studies of signaling within the liver and the interactions of drugs with it, and who in 1996 became the first Black woman to direct a Department of Energy lab.

#WomenInSTEM #ChemSky #BioSky 🧪⚛️

Steering the Future of Women in Science: The Institutional Wizardry of Microbiologist Rita Colwell. One of the exciting and daunting things about doing science in the Twenty-First century is the sheer number of competencies it demands. It is no longer enough to be a person with a particular flair f...

Wishing a happy 91st birthday to Rita Colwell, the institutional wizard who, as the 1st woman director of the NSF and 1st woman president of the American Society for Microbiology has instituted large structural changes to help American science overcome its biases.

tinyurl.com/yk2zf339

#WomenInSTEM

Expectations Defied: The Algebraic Journey of Raman Parimala If you have been reading this series over the years, you’re used to a particular narrative sequence: (1) Brilliant woman researcher establishes herself, with a good reputation and a solid position at ...

Yesterday was the 77th birthday of mathematician Raman Parimala, who developed the first example of a non-trivial quadratic space over an affine plane and has since dug into Clifford algebras, Witt groups, and the Grothendieck-Serre Conjecture.

tinyurl.com/yckhjhav

#WomenInSTEM #MathSky 🧮

Mathematician Louise Duffield Cummings was born 155 years ago today. A researcher on vector spaces with trilinear maps and hexagonal systems, she was also a staple presence at Vassar college for three and a half decades in the early twentieth century.

#WomenInSTEM #MathSky 🧮

Civil engineer Olive Dennis was born 140 years ago today- as a service engineer for the B & O Railroad she introduced reclining seats, air conditioned cars, dimmable ceiling lights, stain resistant upholstery, and individual window vents, all of which became industry standards.

#WomenInSTEM

Wishing a happy 76th birthday to Brazilian plant chemist Vanderlan da Silva Bolzani, whose career has included plant peptide research, the creation of a green lab for bioassaying and biosynthesis, and advocacy for Brazilian biodiversity.

#WomenInSTEM #ChemSky #PlantSky 🧪⚕️⚛️

Edith Graef McGeer, the Great Neurotransmitter Race, and a Glimpse towards the End of Alzheimer’s. The brain can be its own worst enemy. In a host of those diseases, the merest whisper of which is enough to send a streak of black dread through a formerly happy family, the instigator is not a virus,...

Neurorscience legend Edith Graef McGeer was born 102 years ago today. She was a key figure in the great neurotransmitter race of the 1960s, and went on to do groundbreaking work on the complement system's role in Alzheimer's.

tinyurl.com/27mn3npx

#WomenInSTEM #NeuroSky #MedSky #ChemSky 🧪🧠

Mathematician Ruth Aaronson Bari was born 108 years ago today. After surrendering her grad school position to make room for returning WW2 soldiers, she did not resume her career until the age of 47, after which she was widely recognized for her work on chromatic polynomials.

#WomenInSTEM #MathSky 🧮

Ketayun Dinshaw would have been 82 years old today. For decades, she was a driving force behind the modernization of cancer treatment in India, focusing on new radiation techniques and integrated team approaches. Sadly, she passed away in 2011 at the age of just 67.

#WomenInSTEM #MedSky #Cancer ⚕️🧪

Of Her Time: Bethenia Owens-Adair, Pioneer Doctor & Devoted Eugenicist. The American West in the mid 19th century made profound demands on all those fated to experience it. The cost for even momentary lapses of vigilance was often death, and the people raised under the in...

New inductee! Today we examine the complicated legacy of Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair, who opened the gates for women to practice medicine and gain the vote in Oregon, but also devoted the end of her life to the cause of eugenics. Here is her story.

tinyurl.com/436n22yf

#WomenInSTEM #MedSky ⚕️

Ichthyologist Fang Fang Kullander would have been 63 years old today. She travelled the globe for her taxonomical studies of freshwater fish and her work with Fishbase, but passed away at the age of 47 in 2010 from gall duct cancer.

#WomenInSTEM #Ichthyology #FishSky #BioSky 🧪🐟

Interesting question! She was born in Australia to parents who I believe had been born in England, but where that interlaces with Regine's line potentially is a mystery to me. Neat to think about though!!

The Last of the Women Physicians: Dorothea Leporin Erxleben. Prior to the eighteenth century, the answer to the question, ‘Who was allowed to practise medicine?’ was relatively simple: just about anybody. While those who attended university were given a theory-...

Dorothea Erxleben, the first European woman to earn a modern Medical Degree, was born 310 years ago today. The German medical establishment quickly closed ranks after, and it would be over a century until the next woman was given one.

tinyurl.com/bd2hw56u

#WomenInSTEM #MedSky 🧪⚕️

Micropalaeontologist Irene Crespin was born 129 years ago today. The author of some ninety papers, she nonetheless received half the pay of her male colleagues. She was a specialist in the foraminifera of the Indo-Pacific region, working until her mandatory retirement in 1961

#WomenInSTEM #PaleoSky

Beyond Nature Vs. Nurture: Marian Cleeves Diamond and Leda Cosmides In 1964, two publications announced the beginning of two roads out of the centuries-long quagmire represented by the Nature Versus Nurture debate among philosophers, psychologists, and social theorist...

Neuroscientist Marian Cleeves Diamond was born 99 years ago today - her studies of how enriched environments can stimulate changes in brain structure of the 1960s gifted us a new, dynamic picture of the brain and its growth.

tinyurl.com/ycxjrh9t

#WomenInSTEM #NeuroSky 🧪🧠

Core Principles: The Life and Work of Seismologist Inge Lehmann. At 10:17 in the morning on June 17, 1929, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook New Zealand’s Murchison region, causing landslides that claimed seventeen lives, and sending seismic P-waves throughout the E...

New post! Today we celebrate the long life and work of seismologist Inge Lehmann, whose mathematical modeling of the 1929 Murchison earthquake led to her discovery of Earth's solid inner core. Here is her story!

tinyurl.com/yfm6mua2

#WomenInSTEM #EarthScience #Seismology 🧪

Psychologist Helen Thompson Woolley was born 151 years ago today. She was a pioneer in the study of intelligence and gender, whose work challenged the gender assumptions of the 19th century while setting a new standard for comparative psych testing.

#WomenInSTEM #PsychSky 🧠

Wishing a happy 87th birthday to chemist Gloria Long Anderson, who for decades has employed Fluorine-19 NMR as a means of probing a litany of reactions of interest to her. For over half a century, she has been a tentpole figure at Morris Brown College.

#WomenInSTEM #BlackWomenInSTEM #ChemSky 🧪⚛️

Janaki Ammal And the Fight for India’s Botanical Future. Caste. Race. Gender. These were the three categories that, in early twentieth century Madras, combined to determine the boundaries of an individual’s potential. Being of an undesirable categorizat...

Janaki Ammal was born 128 years ago today! A legend of botanical genetics, she studied how polyploidy plays into the resilience of agricultural crops, compiled a sprawling chromosomal atlas of plants, and fought for the preservation of India's natural legacy.

tinyurl.com/2j9hxmjb

#WomenInSTEM

Wishing a happy 42nd birthday to Lithuanian neuroscientist Urtė Neniškytė, who has spent her career identifying interactions between the immune and nervous system, and investigating the molecular pathways behind neural pruning!

#WomenInSTEM #NeuroSky 🧠🧪