Globally, women make up of the science and research workforce. Female scientists are even , and of those women who do enter the STEM field听experience discrimination.
While science is still a male-dominated field, people are trying to change this and include in science and math. There's also a push to feature in the media. To help close the gender gap in tech, Reshma Saujani founded , an organization that to computer science programs. , founded by electrical engineer Kimberly Bryant, brings computer coding lessons to young girls in underrepresented communities.
While Marie Curie was exploring radiation , modern-day women in science are , editing , and . Female scientists have also taken to social media to fight gender stereotypes about how a scientist should look, and the "
爆料TV looked back through history and consulted NASA, news reports, and past Nobel Prize winners to compile a list of 30 amazing women in science. Female scientists should be an inspiration to everyone, but they can be especially important role models for young girls. Click through to see how women in STEM have shaped the world.
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Jennifer Doudna
American , along with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, created the . Bacteria use the CRISPR system to From these snippets they create CRISPR arrays, used to produce RNA segments that destroy virus DNA. Doudna and her lab replaced the arrays with a "guide RNA" to cut particular places in the genome. The use of this technology, which could eradicate disease, has caused .
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Carolyn Porco
Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco was the imaging scientist and the imaging team leader for the . She was instrumental in capturing .
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Jocelyn Bell Burnell
During graduate school at University of Cambridge in 1967, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell helped build a radio telescope that , rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit radiation. The discovery helped future scientist and dark regions of the universe.
Back in 1974, her supervisor Anthony Hewish won the Nobel Prize for the discovery. In 2018, Bell Burnell was officially recognized and was awarded $3 million along with the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
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Barbara McClintock
spent her life studying corn and discovered that genes could move. Depending on their location, these could reversibly alter the expression of other genes. In 1983, thirty years after her discovery, she received , the first lone woman to receive this award.
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Jacqueline Barton
Jacqueline Barton is a chemistry professor at the California Institute of Technology. She was awarded the in 2015 for her work on electron transport in DNA, which helps cells discover and repair mistakes. Barton's that disruption in this transport process may contribute to cancer.
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Pooja Chandrashekar
Chandrasekar with a degree in biomedical engineering, with focus on the intersection of health care and tech. , she created ProjectCSGIRLS, a nonprofit organization that encourages girls in middle school to . She is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar to India studying why the Indian school system fails to support autistic students with learning disabilities.
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Mae Jemison
In 1987, became the first black woman admitted to NASA's astronaut training program. In 1992, she flew aboard the Endeavor mission into space. After leaving NASA, Jemison created an international space camp for teenagers and on the need to encourage women to enter STEM fields.
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Grace Hopper
Computer scientist Grace Hopper, born in 1906, and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. She helped program the first all-electronic digital computer, called UNIVAC. The stations NASA used employed UNIVAC technology to communicate with astronauts.
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Eugenia Kalnay
In 1971, Eugenia Kalnay鈥� at the University of Maryland鈥攚as the first woman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has worked with NASA and the National Weather Service to improve weather prediction models, but her current work focuses on with windmills and solar panels in large desert areas like the Sahara.
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Stephanie Kwolek
Chemist Stephanie Kwolek 鈥攖he material used in bullet-proof vests鈥攚hich was produced by Dupont in 1971. The fibers are and are used in a variety of products, for example, in protective sleeving for underwater cables and ropes that suspend bridges.
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Gertrude Elion
Elion graduated with a . She helped develop antiviral drugs to treat childhood and adult leukemia as well as medicine that helps prevent organ rejection after kidney transplants. In 1983, she aided in the development of azidothymidine (AZT), the first drug approved in the . She and two male coworkers received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1988.
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Henrietta Leavitt
Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt from 1907鈥�1921. She studied properties of stars by looking at photographic plates and discovered that certain stars have a consistent brightness. These "" can be used to calculate astronomical distances, which is how astronomer Edwin Hubble realized the universe was expanding.
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Helen B. Taussig
, known as the , worked with a team that helped develop an operation to treat babies born with a congenital heart defect responsible for ". The procedure laid the groundwork for adult open heart surgery.
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Chien Shiung Wu
The nuclear physicist, who was ," worked on , which led to the development of the atomic bomb. Wu also disproved the law of parity, the quantum mechanics law that holds that two physical systems like atoms are mirror images that behave in the same way. Her colleagues received a Nobel Prize in 1957 for this work, but like many female scientists of the era, .
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Vera Rubin
The calculations of showed galaxies must contain more matter than is visible, resulting in the discovery that at least 90% of the observable universe is .
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Maria Goeppert Mayer
, along with a male colleague, won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the shell nuclear model of the atomic nucleus. The model explains why some atoms .
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M谩ria Telkes
M谩ria Telkes, , developed ways to store solar energy and invented the first residential solar-powered heating system. In 1940, she joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Solar Energy Conversion Project, how to heat a home solely with solar energy.
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Rosalind Franklin
British scientist Rosalind Franklin, who died of ovarian cancer at 37, . Franklin led the team that created "Photo 51," the image that revealed the double-helix structure of DNA. Some say Franklin in the DNA discovery.
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Ir猫ne Joliot-Curie
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Katherine Johnson
In 1962, , portrayed by actress Taraji P. Henson in the movie "Hidden Figures," developed the equations that helped map out the . Johnson also provided calculations that contributed to getting astronauts to the moon and back.
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Jedidah Isler
focuses on , also known as blazars, in distant galaxies. In 2014, she became the first black woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Yale. She hosts VanguardSTEM, a monthly web series that features women of color in the STEM field.
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Elizabeth Blackwell
Elizabeth Blackwell in the mid-1800s, a time when women weren't welcome in medical schools. After she was finally admitted to Geneva Medical College in New York, she became the first woman in America to graduate with a medical degree and to practice medicine as a doctor. In 1868, she opened .
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Cynthia Kenyon
research field is the genetics of aging. She is a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco and the president of aging research for Google's Calico, a research and development company focused on health and longevity. In 1993, Kenyon discovered that in C. elegans roundworms the rate of aging is and does not happen automatically.
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Sunetra Gupta
Sunetra Gupta is at University of Oxford. Her scientific work focuses on infectious diseases. Together with her team, she recently that could lead to long-term flu vaccines.
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Tu YouYou
Chinese phytochemist Tu YouYou created one of the world's . YouYou shared the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
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Jane Goodall
has researched chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania since the 1960s. Her long-term research has allowed people to better understand chimpanzees. She, for example, discovered that chimps can make tools, display social behaviors, and are omnivores.
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Hedy Lamarr
, who co-starred alongside Clark Gable in the 1940s, helped create the technology that led to modern wireless capabilities. During World War II, she to develop a "secret communications system" that would send radio signals over different frequencies to prevent enemies from figuring out the messages.
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