Grace Hopper

1906 - 1992

"Admiral of the cybersea"

Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and US Navy Rear Admiral. She's often referred to as the Admiral of the Cybersea or "Amazing Grace" for her many computing innovations. After earning her PhD in mathematics from Yale in 1934, she enlisted in the Navy, graduated first in her class and began working on the Mark I computer. In 1949, she recommended that a new programming language be developed using entirely English words, but was told very quickly that she couldn't do this because computers didn't understand English. Her idea wasn't accepted for 3 years, but by 1952 she had an operational compiler, A-0. A compiler is a computer program that converts code written in a language that programmers can understand to 0s and 1s for the computer to understand.

She is also known for popularizing the term "computer bug" after she found an actual moth trapped in the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator and deemed the machine "debugged" after retrieving the insect. Grace also developed the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components for early programming languages like COBOL and FORTRAN.

Her awards are many, including the National Medal of Technology and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The USS Hopper, nicknamed “Amazing Grace”, is on a very short list of US military vessels named after women. A few days ago Yale announced that it is renaming Calhoun College after her. Grace Hopper believed in taking chances and the potential of young people. To quote her: the most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training young people.

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi

1947 - Present

"The woman who discovered HIV"

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi is a French viologist and director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Division at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 1983.

Unsure whether she wanted to pursue research in her career, Barré-Sinoussi searched for volunteer positions in research laboratories during her undergraduate degree at the University of Paris. Jean-Claude Chermann agreed to host her in his laboratory, and quickly proposed a Ph.D. project for her. She agreed, and after completing her PhD in 1975 she focused on a particular group of viruses: retroviruses. Retroviruses are viruses whose genomes consist of RNA and whose genes can be incorporated into host cells' DNA. Her knowledge in the area led to the identification if HIV as the cause of AIDS during the 1980s epidemic. She won the Nobel Prize in 2008 in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery. Her work has been fundamental in radically improving treatment for AIDS patients.

Margaret Ann Bulkley

1789 - 1865

"A woman ahead of her time, who pretended to be a man to pursue a career where she was not welcome"

Margaret Ann Bulkley was a war hero, a medical pioneer, and a brilliant surgeon. Born in a time when women were not permitted to pursue medicine, she disguised herself as a boy and never looked back. After graduating from medical school she enlisted in the British military. She crafted the swashbuckling, flirtatious, "ladies' man" persona of Dr. James Barry to avoid suspicion as she practiced medicine all over the British Empire. While in Cape Town, she performed the first successful Caesarean section by a European doctor. In 1866, she delivered a future prime minister of South Africa via Caesarean section, who was named James Barry Munnik Hertzog in her honor. She rose through the ranks of the British military to become the Inspector General of Hospitals. She was a public health advocate who fought for better nutrition, sanitation and care for prisoners, lepers, soldiers and their families.

Only after she died did anyone discover her secret. The scandal rocked the Victorian establishment, and the army placed an embargo on James Barry's military record for a hundred years. Margaret Ann Bulkley could have stayed home, married and had kids. But she was determined to become a doctor even if it meant living a lie. She was not only the first British woman to graduate in medicine but also one of the day’s most infamous and respected surgeons.

Vera Rubin

1928 - 2016

"The woman who transformed modern astronomy"

Vera Rubin was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She found a discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion, by studying galactic rotation curves. Basically she found that things in far reaches of a galaxy rotated at the same speed as things near the center, an unexpected phenomenon called the galaxy rotation problem. A possible explanation was dark matter, that there was more matter in a galaxy than anyone could see. She is best known for discovering evidence of dark matter.

Rubin struggled with gender barriers throughout her career. She was rejected from the graduate astronomy program at Princeton due to her gender, and later had to meet with a famous astrophysicist in the lobby because women were not allowed in his office area. While working at the Palomar observatory in 1965, she taped an outline of a skirt onto the image of a man on the bathroom door because there was no women’s bathroom.

Vera Rubin transformed modern physics and astronomy through her work, and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1993 by President Clinton.

Rachel Carson

1907 - 1964

"Mother of the environmental movement"

Rachel Carson was an American marine biologist, author and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings is credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Silent Spring spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. President Jimmy Carter posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor.

Ada Yonath

1939 - Present

"Researching the ribosome"

Ada Yonath is an Israeli crystallographer best known for her work pioneering the structure of the ribosome. An organism's vital functions are managed by large complex protein molecules produced in cells' ribosomes. Genetic information from messenger RNA is translated into chains of amino acids as they pass through the ribosome and form the foundation of proteins. In the 1970s Ada began a project that culminated in 2000 when she successfully mapped (together with other researchers) the structure of the ribosome, containing thousands of atoms, through X-ray crystallography. Her work has been crucial to the production of antibiotics among many other applications.

She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for her landmark work, making her the first Israeli woman and the first woman from the Middle East to win a Nobel Prize. She was also the first woman in 45 years to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Mildred Dresselhaus

1930 - 2017

"Queen of Carbon"

Known as the Queen of Carbon, Mildred Dresselhaus was a Jewish American physicist with a 57-year career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first woman to obtain a full professorship at MIT, she is most famous for unlocking the secrets of carbon and imagining new forms of the material such as carbon nanotubes and fullerenes.

Irène Joliot-Curie

1897 - 1956

"The woman who achieved the alchemist’s dream"

Irène Joliot-Curie, was Marie Curie’s daughter and a brilliant scientist in her own right. Building on her mother's work of isolating naturally occurring radioactive elements, she successfully achieved the alchemist's dream of turning one element into another: creating radioactive nitrogen from boron, radioactive isotopes of phosphorous from aluminum, and silicon from magnesium. She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for her pioneering work in induced radioactivity.

Youyou Tu

1930 - Present

"Professor of 3 No’s"

YouYou Tu is a Chinese pharmacologist who won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for her discovery of artemisinin, a compound used to treat malaria, isolated from the sweet wormwood plant often found in Chinese Traditional Medicine. When others wanted to abandon the research, she found a solution in a millennium-old recipe. She also first tested the compound on herself! She has saved millions of lives with her groundbreaking work and is often referred to as the professor of 3 no's: no post-graduate degree, no research abroad experience and no affiliation with any Chinese national academies.

Youyou Tu was the first female citizen of the People’s Republic of China to win a Nobel Prize, and the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award.

Katherine Johnson

1918 - Present

"A girl who loved to count became the woman who sent a man to the moon"

Katherine Johnson was a mathematician who worked at NASA for three decades, calculating flight trajectories and landings for a number of high profile missions. She performed the trajectory analysis for Freedom 7, which put the first man in space. John Glenn specifically asked that Johnson confirm the trajectory for his Friendship 7 expedition, the first time an American orbited the earth. She also contributed trajectory calculations for the Apollo 11 flight to the moon.

For her incredible contributions to space exploration in her 30 years at NASA, Katherine Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2015, America’s highest civilian honor.

Chien-Shiun Wu

1912 - 1997

"The First Lady of Physics"

Chien-Shiung Wu was born in China in a time when girls were discouraged from going to school and endured numerous uphill battles to become one of the most esteemed scientists of the 20th century. Unfortunately, few have heard of her. Her research contributions during the Manhattan Project made the development of the atomic bomb possible. She made history when she disproved the hypothetical law of conservation parity, a bedrock law of physics that many others were too afraid to test.

Although she didn't receive the Nobel Prize for her work on conservation parity when her male colleagues did, she has an impressive list of firsts. She was the first Chinese-American to be elected into the US National Academy of Sciences, the first woman with an honorary doctorate from Princeton, the first female President of the American Physical Society, the first person to receive the Wolf Prize of physics in its inaugural year (1978), one of the first Chinese-American educators to travel to Red China for visits in the 1970s and the first living scientist to have an asteroid (2752 Wu Chien-Shiung) named after her.

Rita Levi-Montalcini

1909 - 2012

"The woman who discovered nerve growth factor (NGF)"

Rita Levi-Montalcini was an Italian Nobel Laureate honored for her work in neurobiology. She won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for the discovery of nerve growth factor. She was born in 1909 in Turin into a Sephardi Jewish family. Her father discouraged her aspirations of becoming a doctor because he feared it would disrupt her life as a wife and mother. She became a doctor anyway and began a career in neurology research. Her academic career was cut short as a result of Mussolini's 1938 ban barring Jews from academic and professional careers. So she set up a laboratory in her bedroom and studied the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos, which laid the groundwork for her later research.

In 1946 she was granted a fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. She replicated her previous work done in her makeshift bedroom lab and was offered a research position at the university which she held for 30 years. There, in 1952 she did her most important work, isolating the nerve growth factor from observations of certain cancerous tissues that cause extremely rapid growth of nerve cells. She became the first Nobel Laureate ever to reach the age of 100.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

1906 - 1972

"The woman who discovered the structure of atomic nuclei"

Maria Goeppert-Mayer, a German-born American theoretical physicist, is best known for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. As known in modern physics, an atom is made up of a nucleus consisting of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons distributed within shells with a fixed number of electrons. In 1949, Maria developed a model in which nucleons were distributed in shells with different energy levels. She won the Nobel Prize in physics for her groundbreaking work in 1963.

Ada Lovelace

1815 - 1852

"The world’s first computer programmer"

Ada Lovelace was a countess, English mathematician and writer, most recognized for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She is regarded as the world's first computer programmer for her publication in 1843, suggesting the data input that would program the Analytic Machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, now considered the first computer program. Babbage was so impressed, he dubbed her the "Enchantress of Numbers."

Beyond understanding the intricacies of Babbage's machine, Ada Lovelace was a visionary. She predicted what would happen 100 years in the future, that machines like the Analytical Engine could be used to compose music, create graphics, and would be vital for scientific progress. She understood that numbers could be used to represent so much more than just quantities. Lovelace became a brilliant mathematician, thanks in part to opportunities that were denied most women of the time. Born into aristocracy, the daughter of famous poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke, she was already destined for the history books. But her curiosity about how society relates to technology as a collaborative tool and contributions to the field of mathematics made her a pioneer.

Helen Rodríguez-Trias

1929 - 2001

"An advocate for healthcare and social justice"

Helen Rodríguez-Trias was a pediatrician and women’s rights activist, and was the first Latina to serve as president of the American Public Health Association.

During her years in Puerto Rico, Rodriguez-Trias became aware that unsuspecting Puerto Rican women were being sterilized and that Puerto Rico was being used by the United States as a laboratory for the development of birth control technology. Outraged, she began advocating for women's reproductive rights and campaigning for change at a policy level.

Throughout her career, Rodríguez-Trias advocated for low-income populations in the United States, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. She fought for reproductive rights, worked with women with HIV, and joined the effort to stop sterilization abuse. In 2001 she was awarded the Presidential Citizen's Medal by President Clinton for her work on behalf of women, children, people with HIV and AIDS, and the poor.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

1910 - 1994

"The woman who discovered the crystal structure of insulin"

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was a British chemist who developed protein crystallography, for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1964. She revolutionized research with her advanced technique, which allowed her to determine the 3-D structures of biomolecules. Her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin and structure of vitamin B12. In 1969, after 35 years of work, she also deciphered the structure of insulin. Her work was described by her contemporaries as being as significant as "breaking the sound barrier." But she didn't stop at figuring out the structure of insulin, she continued research on insulin and travelled the world giving talks about its importance in diabetes. She was the third woman to win the Nobel Prize and among her numerous accolades also remains the only woman to ever receive the Copley Medal by the Royal Society.

Farida Bedwei

1979 - Present

"A software engineer unfazed by cerebral palsy"

Farida Bedwei is a Ghanian software engineer who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when she was only one year old. With passion and tenacity, she has become one of Africa’s most powerful women in financial technology.

Armed with only a one-year computer course, Bedwei convinced the head of the technical division at Soft, an African software company, to give her a job. Three years later, she moved to Rancard Solutions in Ghana to become a senior software architect – all before completing a bachelor’s degree.

After completing a one-year bachelor’s program in England, she returned to Ghana to work as the head of IT for G-Life Financial Services, where she and a colleague proceeded to develop a new cloud software called gKudi. In 2011, she left to start her own company, Logiciel, which specializes in software engineering for the microfinance industry.

Rosalind Franklin

1920 - 1958

"Dame of DNA"

Rosalind Franklin used X-ray diffraction to take a picture of DNA that changed biology. Photo 51, her picture of DNA, was shown to James Watson and Francis Crick without her knowledge by her colleague Maurice Wilkins who thought she was just a lab assistant when she was heading up her own projects. This photo allowed Watson and Crick to deduce the correct structure for DNA. They published a series of articles in the scientific journal Nature in April 1953. Franklin also published in the same issue and provided even more details on DNA's structure. Though Franklin's image of DNA was critical to deciphering its structure, the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was only awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. Her story is one of the most well-known and shameful instances of a researcher being robbed of credit.

Gertrude B. Elion

1918 - 1999

"A trailblazer in drug development"

Gertrude B. Elion was an American biochemist and pharmacologist. She developed a multitude of drugs using innovative research methods that would later lead to the development of the AIDS drug AZT. She also developed the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used for organ transplants. She worked largely with purines developing the first treatment for leukemia, and treatments for gout, malaria, cancer and meningitis. She won the Nobel Prize in 1988 for her extraordinary work.

Elion made the difficult decision to leave Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute midway through her Ph.D. studies when faced with the ultimatum of quitting her job at Burroughs-Wellcome to focus on her doctoral work full time. Years later, however, she was awarded honorary doctorates from George Washington University, Brown University and the University of Michigan.

Sylvia Earle

1935 - Present

"The Sturgeon General"

Sylvia Earle is an American marine biologist and explorer. She has been a NatGeo explorer-in-residence since 1998. She was the first female chief scientist of the US National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration and was named TIME Magazine's first Hero of the Planet in 1998. After receiving her PhD in 1966, and spending a year at Harvard as a research fellow, she was selected to lead the all-female aquanauts team of Tektite II, with the goal of exploring the marine environment and deepwater habitats. She is often referred to as "Her Deepness" or "The Sturgeon General". She began her initiative, Mission Blue, in 2009 after winning the TED Prize. The program aims to establish marine protected areas around the globe. She remains heavily involved in marine conservation and exploring deep ocean environments.

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

1942 - Present

"Genetics Genius"

In more advanced organisms, life begins when a fertilized egg divides and forms new cells that in turn divide and segment off to make up the heart, brain, hair for example. Genes regulate this process. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, a German developmental biologist, studied the development of fruit flies and, around 1980, succeeded in identifying and classifying the 15 genes that direct the cells to form a new fly. She won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for this groundbreaking work.

Nüsslein-Volhard has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Utrecht, Princeton University, the University of Freiburg, and Harvard University. She has won many awards for her work and even had an asteroid named in her honor: the 15811 Nüsslein-Volhard.

Linda Buck

1947 - Present

"The woman who decoded the olfactory system"

In 1980, Linda began her post-doctoral research at Columbia University where she set out to map out how pheromones and odors are detected in the nose and interpreted by the brain. Her landmark paper published in 1991 described how hundreds of genes code for the odorant sensors located in the olfactory neurons of our noses. Each receptor is a protein that changes when an odor attaches to the receptor, causing a signal to be sent to the brain. By analyzing rat DNA, she was able to estimate that there are about 1000 different genes for olfactory receptors in the mammalian genome. Remarkably, each olfactory neuron only expresses one kind of olfactory receptor protein, and the input from neurons expressing the same receptor is collected by a single dedicated glomerulus, a spherical structure in the olfactory bulb that shuttles the signal to the rain. She won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004 for her work on olfactory receptors. Her work has opened the doors to the genetic and molecular analysis of our sense of smell.

Maryam Mirzakhani

1977 - 2017

"The woman who made mathematics history"

Maryam Mirzakhani made mathematics history on August 13, 2014 when she became both the first woman and the first Iranian honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. Her sophisticated and highly original research contributions include Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. She focused on understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces, such as spheres, the surfaces of doughnuts and of hyperbolic objects.

She was the first woman to win the world's most prestigious mathematics prize for the first time since the award was established nearly 80 years ago. Her work has the potential to influence many areas of study, including material science, engineering, quantum field theory, and even theoretical physics as it applies to the origin of the Universe.

Mae Jemison

1956 - Present

"The first black woman in space"

Mae Jemison was not only the first black woman to travel in space but also an accomplished engineer and physician. On September 12, 1992, she flew into space on the Shuttle Endeavour for mission STS-47. As mission specialist, she was responsible for conducting scientific experiments exploring weightlessness, motion sickness and bone cells while on the shuttle. Despite NASA's rigid protocol, she would always begin each shift with a salute that only a Trekkie could appreciate, "hailing frequencies open" she would repeat throughout the 8-day mission. Because of her love of dance, she took an Alvin Ailey poster with her on the mission saying that "science and dance are both expressions of the boundless creativity that people have to share with one another". She left NASA in 1993 to start the Jemison Group that researches, markets and develops science and technology for daily life.

May-Britt Moser

1963 - Present

"Queen of Neuroscience"

May-Britt Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, and heads up the Center for Neural Computation at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. May-Britt pioneered research on the brain's mechanism for representing space. She won the Nobel Prize in 2014 for her discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex and several other space representing neurons that make up the positioning system of the brain. She's studied correlations between the anatomical structure of the hippocampus and social learning in rats, which laid the foundation for new research into the cognitive and spacial deficits associated with neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.

Fun fact: she accepted her Nobel Prize in a specially designed gown depicting grid cells.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

1921 - 2011

"The woman behind the radioimmunoassay"

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, was an American medical physicist and winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique. RIA is a technique used to measure minute quantities of hormones and other antigens in the human body. Rosalyn first used it to study insulin levels in diabetes mellitus but it has been widely used in a number of detection screens, from looking for the presence of drugs to identifying certain disease or allergy markers like peptic ulcers. The process involves "tagging" or labeling known antigens with radioactive isotopes so they can be easily identified. RIA is considered the pioneer in nuclear medicine radioactive measurements because radioactive substances show up with great accuracy and clarity. Though it is still used in labs around the world, labs are shifting towards methods that rely less on radioactivity.

Rosalyn started out as a part-time secretary, not believing that any graduate school would admit and provide financial support to a woman. But soon after picking up some stenography skills on the side she was offered a teaching assistantship at the University of Illinois because the university decided to offer spots to women instead of shut down, since WWII had sent most of the men overseas. She earned her PhD there and was the only woman among the department's 400 members and the first since 1917. For her extraordinary work she was awarded the 1972 William S. Middleton award, the highest honor of the VA Medical Center. She was also the first woman to receive the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.

Valerie Thomas

1943 - Present

"Inventor of the illusion transmitter"

Valerie Thomas is an American scientist and inventor who patented the illusion transmitter in 1980. After seeing an illusion that involved concave mirrors and light bulbs in a museum, she became curious about how she might apply concave mirrors in her work at NASA. Her invention, the illusion transmitter grew out of her experimentation with concave mirrors. You could call it early 3D technology. Her invention transmits an optical illusion of a 3D image between concave mirrors that looks real on the receiving end. NASA continues to use her technology to this day. She also developed real-time computer data systems to support satellite control centers and oversaw the creation of the NASA Landsat program that spearheaded some of the first image transmissions from space.

Gertrude Cox

1900 - 1978

"The statistical bridge between theoreticians and research workers"

Gertrude Cox, born in Iowa, was an influential figure whose work helped to establish and shape many of the statistic institutes still around today. While she originally planned to become a deaconess in the Methodist Episcopal church, she pursued a more academic route, receiving a degree in mathematics from Iowa State College in 1929 and the first master’s degree awarded in statistics two years later. in 1939, she became a research assistant professor and began her explorations on experimental design. Her assembled notes on standard design eventually led to ‘Experimental Designs,’ a textbook co-authored by William G. Cochran and published in 1950; this textbook is still widely referenced today as a comprehensive resource in the field of experimental design.

Cox’s accomplishments boast many administrative roles and duties; among them, she served as the director of North Carolina State College (1944), the new Department of Mathematical Statistics at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (1946), and the Department of Biostatistics at the School of Public Health based in University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (1949). She was known for her strong skill as an administrator, having employed many exceptional faculty and staff during her directorship.

Cox was awarded many honors throughout her life; most notably, in 1949, she became the first female elected into the International Statistical Institute. As the founder of the Department of Experimental Statistics at North Carolina State University, the current home of the Department of Statistics, Cox Hall, has stood in her honor since 1970.

Designed by Lisa Wong.
Inspired by 'Beyond Curie,' a design project by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya.

Cavell Brownie

? - Present

"Wildlife sampling extraordinaire"

Cavell Brownie, a leading researcher in wildlife sampling, has co-authored two highly-cited and widely-published monographs relevant to this field. She has previously served as a faculty member in the statistics department at North Carolina State University from 1982 through 2007. Brownie’s other research interests include agricultural statistics and capture/re-capture methods.

Brownie was the recipient of the 1988-1989 D.D. Mason Award for her “dedicated and outstanding leadership of the department's statistical consulting training program” and “high standards of scholarship in research, consulting and teaching.” The Dr. Cavell Brownie Mentoring Faculty Award, established in 2011 and awarded annually, is named in recognition of Brownie’s generous mentoring and seeks to encourage similar practices by current faculty.

Designed by Lisa Wong.
Inspired by 'Beyond Curie,' a design project by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya.

Beth Mynatt

1966 - Present

"A champion for accessible technology"

Beth Mynatt’s work and research is primarily focused on the accessibility and usability of technology, including its use as a means for visual communication; her thesis was entitled Audio GUIs: Transforming Graphical User Interfaces into Auditory Interfaces. Mynatt taught courses ranging from Human-Computer Interaction to Media Consumption at the Georgia Institute of Technology before branching out to similar research fields.

Mynatt currently holds, and has previously held, various administrative positions at the Aware Home Research Initiative, the GVU Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Health Systems Institute. In addition, she directs her own research program “Everyday Computing,” in which ubiquitous computing and its advantages in improving everyday life is studied. Mynatt has been internationally recognized for her work and is currently a professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology as well as the executive director of the Institute for People and Technology.

Designed by Danny Schmidt.
Inspired by 'Beyond Curie,' a design project by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya.

Nancy J. Currie-Gregg

1958 - Present

"The space robotic system operations expert"

After graduation with her bachelors, Nancy J. Currie-Gregg attended rotary-wing pilot training, successfully completed her training, and was assigned as an instructor pilot at the U.S Army Aviation School. After holding numerous positions and promotions, Master Army Aviator Currie-Gregg has collectively logged over 3,900 hours of various aircraft flying time. Assigned to NASA Johnson Space Center in September 1987 as a flight simulation engineer for the Shuttle Training Aircraft, Currie-Gregg would officially become an astronaut in 1990.

With 1,000 hours documented in space, Currie-Gregg is a veteran of four Space Shuttle Missions including STS-57 (1993), STS-70 (1995), STS-88 (1998), and STS-109 (2002). Her expertise in space robotic system operations has made an enormous impact on the field of robotics and space systems; she is the author or co-author of 11 technical journal articles regarding human factors engineering and robotics.

Currie-Gregg is a member of Army Aviation Association of America, Phi Kappa Phi, Ohio State University and ROTC Alumni Associations, Institute of Industrial Engineers, and Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. She currently holds an appointment as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at North Carolina State University.

Designed by Téa Blumer.
Inspired by 'Beyond Curie,' a design project by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya.

Trudy Mackay

1952 - Present

"A specialist in quantitative genetics"

A native of Canada, Trudy Mackay is a distinguished scientist and professor within the field of quantitative genetics. Though she discovered a knack for mathematics and biology in high school, her interest in genetics stems from her belief that it is the “most exact and rigorous discipline in experimental biology.”

Mackay is most recognized for her work on the Drosophila Genetic Reference Guide, a publicly available resource containing over 200 lines of identical, yet genetically varied, fruit flies. This guide is a valuable asset to researchers around the globe who are interested in unlocking the secrets to complex traits like aggression and alcohol tolerance. Her work has several far-reaching implications for the future of the world’s food supply and the advancement of medical research on many human conditions.

Though she is the recipient of numerous awards such as the Genetics Society of America Medal in 2004 and the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 2016, Mackay has also co-authored the fourth edition of ‘Introduction to Quantitative Genetics’ with Douglas Falconer. She is currently a member of the associate faculty at North Carolina State University.

Designed by Louis Bailey.
Inspired by 'Beyond Curie,' a design project by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya.