August is Women’s Equality Month
Spotlight Scientists
Williamina Fleming (1857 - 1911)
Williamina Fleming was a Scottish immigrant who came to Boston in 1878. She was a single mother who worked as a maid in the home of Harvard professor Edward Pickering until he offered her a job as a Harvard Computer, where she worked with other prominent scientists, such as Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Leavitt. She created a system of stellar classification that characterized stars based on the amount of Hydrogen in their spectrum. She is credited with the discovery of the Horsehead Nebula, as well as of the first white dwarf.
Maria Mitchell (1818 - 1889)
Maria Mitchell was the first international known woman to work as a professional astronomer and a professor. She worked at Vassar College, and her legacy is credited with inspiring Vera Rubin to study there. She had a wide range of research interests, studying planetary and lunar movements, nebulae, double stars, and solar eclipses. She and her students were the first to take consistent, daily images of the Sun to analyze the presence of sunspots over time. She discovered a comet (1847 VI), nicknamed “Miss Mitchell’s comet” in 1847, which awarded her a gold medal presented by the king of Denmark.
Donna Strickland (1959 - Present)
Donna Strickland is a Professor of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. She studied at the University of Rochester in New York to get her PhD, at which time she also conducted research into chirped pulse amplification in lasers. This research allowed for some of the most intense laser pulses to be created, and it earned her the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. These techniques are utilized today in laser micromachining, laser surgery, and medicine. She has also served as the president of the Optical Society, an association of individuals with an interest in optics and photonics.
GMU Student Spotlight
Raina Elliott
Hey y'all! My name is Raina Elliott, my pronouns are she/her, and I’m a senior! As an Army brat, I’ve lived in 9 different states and Italy, but my family is located in Pennsylvania. I started as an Aerospace Engineering student at Penn State University before transferring to Mason. Now, I study astrophysics part-time and work as a Space Systems Engineer in Mission Operations at Northrop Grumman. The first launch I was ever a part of was the NASA Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) in 2018, and my most recent project was the launch of the NG-16 Cygnus cargo mission. When I’m not juggling work and school, you can find me travelling, hiking, reading, listening to music, or spending time with family. Being a woman in a heavily male dominated profession has had its challenges, and those challenges are a large part of why I initially became a mentor for SPECTRUM and why I now am enjoying the additional participation of being part of the leadership. It is really important that we empower women (and other underrepresented groups) to pursue the careers they want, not the careers they think may be the most amenable to them.
The women in our spotlight changed the course of science over and over. However, there are uncountable more that accelerated our progress further.
To learn more about these incredible women, follow the links below:
Marie Curie: Nobel Prize, Smithsonian
Annie Jump Cannon: National Women's History Museum, Britannica
Vera Rubin: American Natural History Museum, Nature, NSF
Shirley Ann Jackson: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, APS, PBS
Kalpana Chawla: Space.com, Texas State Historical Association, Space Center Houston
Angela Clayton: LGBT Project Wiki, LGBT+ History Month
France A. Córdova: NSF, Purdue University, AIP
Sandra Faber: AIP, Franklin Institute, UC Santa Cruz
Fabiola Gianotti: IOP, CERN, Northwestern University
Margaret Hamilton: Smithsonian Magazine, IEEE Computer Society
Caroline Herschel: ESA, Space.com, University of St. Andrews
Grace Hopper: Yale, National Women’s History Museum, Navy
Hypatia of Alexandria: Smithsonian Magazine, Agnes Scott College
Mae Jemison: Space.com, National Women’s History Museum, Biography.com
Katherine Johnson: NASA, Space.com, Nature, NPR
Hedy Lamarr: National Women’s History Museum, Forbes
Henrietta Leavitt: FamousScientists.org, Astronomy.com, Scientific Women
Maria Goeppert Mayer: Nobel Bio, APS, National Women’s Hall of Fame
Lise Meitner: FamousScientists.org, APS, Atomic Heritage Foundation
Willie Hobbs Moore: University of Michigan, BlackPast, NSBP
Ellen Ochoa: Space Center Houston, APS
Sally Ride: NASA, NPR, National Women's History Museum
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: APS, Massive Science, ScienceNews
Ruby Payne-Scott: NRAO, Australian Dictionary of Biography, CSIROpedia
Mary Golda Ross: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Magazine, Massive Science
Mercedes Richards: NSBP, EurekAlert, POC Squared
Nancy Grace Roman: NASA, Space.com, NPR
Dorothy Weeks: AIP
Agnes E. Wells: Saginaw County Hall of Fame
Chien-Shiung Wu: Atomic Heritage Foundation, National Park Service, NSF