This is a timeline of women in science, spanning from ancient history up to the 21st century. While the timeline primarily focuses on women involved with natural sciences such as astronomy, biology, chemistry and physics, it also includes women from the social sciences (e.g. sociology, psychology) and the formal sciences (e.g. mathematics, computer science), as well as notable science educators and medical scientists. The chronological events listed in the timeline relate to both scientific achievements and gender equality within the sciences.
Ancient history
The Tapputi Belatekallim tablet
1900 BCE: Aganice, also known as Athyrta, was an Egyptian princess during the Middle Kingdom (about 2000–1700 BCE) working on astronomy and natural philosophy.[1]
c. 1500 BCE: Hatshepsut, also known as the Queen Doctor, promoted a botanical expedition searching for officinal plants.[1]
1200 BCE: The Mesopotamian perfume-maker Tapputi-Belatekallim was referenced in the text of a cuneiform tablet. She is often considered the world's first recorded chemist.[2]
c. 150 BCE: Aglaonice became the first female astronomer to be recorded in Ancient Greece.[3][4]
Early post-classical history
1st century CE: Mary the Jewess was among the world's first alchemists.[5]
1st century BCE: A woman known only as Fang became the earliest recorded Chinese female alchemist. She is credited with "the discovery of how to turn mercury into silver" – possibly the chemical process of boiling off mercury in order to extract pure silver residue from ores.[6]
c. 300–350 CE: Greek mathematician Pandrosion develops a numerical approximation for cube roots.[7]
c. 355–415 CE: Greek astronomer, mathematician and philosopher Hypatia became renowned as a respected academic teacher, commentator on mathematics, and head of her own science academy.[8][9]
c. 975 CE: Chinese alchemist Keng Hsien-Seng was employed by the Royal Court. She distilled perfumes, utilized an early form of the Soxhlet process to extract camphor into alcohol, and gained recognition for her skill in using mercury to extract silver from ores.[6][11]
fl. 1333 Margarita da Venosa , licensed Napolitan surgeon, who studied at the University of Salerno She was considered a noteworthy practitioner and counted Ladislaus, king of Naples, as a patient.
fl. 1333 Maria Incarnata, Italian surgeon, mentioned in Pope Sixtus IV edict regarding physicians and surgeons[20]
1561: Italian alchemist Isabella Cortese published her popular book The Secrets of Lady Isabella Cortese. The work included recipes for medicines, distilled oils and cosmetics, and was the only book published by a female alchemist in the 16th century.[21]
1572: Italian botanist Loredana Marcello died from the plague – but not before developing several effective palliative formulas for plague sufferers, which were used by many physicians.[22][23]
1572: Danish scientist Sophia Brahe (1556–1643) assisted her brother Tycho Brahe with his astronomical observations.[24]
1590: After her husband's death, Caterina Vitale took over his position as chief pharmacist to the Order of St John, becoming the first female chemist and pharmacist in Malta.[25][26]
1636: Anna Maria van Schurman is the first woman ever to attend university lectures.[28] She had to sit behind a screen so that her male fellow students would not see her.
1642: Martine Bertereau, the first recorded female mineralogist, was imprisoned in France on suspicion of witchcraft. Bertereau had published two written works on the science of mining and metallurgy before being arrested.[6]
1650: Silesian astronomer Maria Cunitz published Urania Propitia, a work that both simplified and substantially improved Johannes Kepler's mathematical methods for locating planets. The book was published in both Latin and German, an unconventional decision that made the scientific text more accessible for non-university educated readers.[29]
1656: French chemist and alchemist Marie Meurdrac published her book La Chymie Charitable et Facile, en Faveur des Dames (Useful and Easy Chemistry, for the Benefit of Ladies).[30]
1667: Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne (1623 – 15 December 1673) was an English aristocrat, philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction-writer, and playwright during the 17th century. She was the first woman to attend a meeting at the Royal Society of London, in 1667, and she criticised and engaged with members and philosophers Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and Robert Boyle.[31]
1668: After separating from her husband, French polymath Marguerite de la Sablière established a popular salon in Paris. Scientists and scholars from different countries visited the salon regularly to discuss ideas and share knowledge, and Sablière studied physics, astronomy and natural history with her guests.[32]
1680: French astronomer Jeanne Dumée published a summary of arguments supporting the Copernican theory of heliocentrism. She wrote "between the brain of a woman and that of a man there is no difference".[33]
1685: Frisian poet and archaeologist Titia Brongersma supervised the first excavation of a dolmen in Borger, Netherlands. The excavation produced new evidence that the stone structures were graves constructed by prehistoric humans – rather than structures built by giants, which had been the prior common belief.[34]
1690: German-Polish astronomer Elisabetha Koopman Hevelius, widow of Johannes Hevelius, whom she had assisted with his observations (and, probably, computations) for over twenty years, published in his name Prodromus Astronomiae, the largest and most accurate star catalog to that date.[35]
1693–1698: German astronomer and illustrator Maria Clara Eimmart created more than 350 detailed drawings of the moon phases.[36]
1699: German entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian, the first scientist to document the life cycle of insects for the public, embarked on a scientific expedition to Suriname, South America. She subsequently published Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, a groundbreaking illustrated work on South American plants, animals and insects.[37]
1702: Pioneering English entomologist Eleanor Glanville captured a butterfly specimen in Lincolnshire, which was subsequently named the Glanville fritillary in her honour. Her extensive butterfly collection impressed fellow entomologist William Vernon, who called Glanville's work "the noblest collection of butterflies, all English, which has sham'd us". Her butterfly specimens became part of early collections in the Natural History Museum.[38][39]
1702: German astronomer Maria Kirch became the first woman to discover a comet.[40]
c. 1702–1744: In Montreal, Canada, French botanist Catherine Jérémie collected plant specimens and studied their properties, sending the specimens and her detailed notes back to scientists in France.[41]
1732: At the age of 20, Italian physicist Laura Bassi became the first female member of the Bologna Academy of Sciences. One month later, she publicly defended her academic theses and received a PhD. Bassi was awarded an honorary position as professor of physics at the University of Bologna. She was the first female physics professor in the world.[42]
1738: French polymath Émilie du Châtelet became the first woman to have a paper published by the Paris Academy, following a contest on the nature of fire.[43]
1740: French polymath Émilie du Châtelet published Institutions de Physique (Foundations of Physics) providing a metaphysical basis for Newtonian physics.[44]
1748: Swedish agronomistEva Ekeblad became the first female member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Two years earlier, she had developed a new process of using potatoes to make flour and alcohol, which subsequently lessened Sweden's reliance on wheat crops and decreased the risk of famine.[45]
1751: 19-year-old Italian physicist Cristina Roccati received her PhD from the University of Bologna.[46]
1754: Dorothea Erxleben was the first female to be awarded a doctor in medicine in Germany (University of Halle, then Kingdom of Prussia). She practiced medicine from 1747 to 1762 in Quedlinburg.
1755: After the death of her husband, Italian anatomist Anna Morandi Manzolini took his place at the University of Bologna, becoming a professor of anatomy and establishing an internationally known laboratory for anatomical research.[48]
1760: American horticulturalist Martha Daniell Logan began corresponding with botanic specialist and collector John Bartram, regularly exchanging seeds, plants and botanical knowledge with him.[50]
1762: French astronomer Nicole-Reine Lepaute calculated the time and percentage of a solar eclipse that had been predicted to occur in two years time. She created a map to show the phases, and published a table of her calculations in the 1763 edition of Connaissance des Temps.[49]
1766: French chemist Geneviève Thiroux d'Arconville published her study on putrefaction. The book presented her observations from more than 300 experiments over the span of five years, during which she attempted to discover factors necessary for the preservation of beef, eggs, and other foods. Her work was recommended for royal privilege by fellow chemist Pierre-Joseph Macquer.[51]
c. 1775: Herbalist/botanist Jeanne Baret becomes the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.
c. 1775: French chemist, scientific artist and translator, Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier began working with her husband chemist Antoine Lavoisier. She was instrumental in the 1789 publication of her husband’s groundbreaking Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, which presented a unified view of chemistry as a field, as she drew diagrams of all the equipment used, and kept strict records that lended validity to the findings. She also translated and critiqued Richard Kirwan's 'Essay on Phlogiston and the Constitution of Acids' which led to the discovery of oxygen gas.[52]
1782–1791: French chemist and mineralogist Claudine Picardet translated more than 800 pages of Swedish, German, English and Italian scientific papers into French, enabling French scientists to better discuss and utilize international research in chemistry, mineralogy and astronomy.[53]
c. 1787–1797: Self-taught Chinese astronomer Wang Zhenyi published at least twelve books and multiple articles on astronomy and mathematics. Using a lamp, a mirror and a table, she once created a famous scientific exhibit designed to accurately simulate a lunar eclipse.[54][55]
1786–1797: German astronomer Caroline Herschel discovered eight new comets,[56] along with numerous other discoveries.
1789: French astronomer Louise du Pierry, the first Parisian woman to become an astronomy professor, taught the first astronomy courses specifically open to female students.[57]
c. 1796–1820: During the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor, astronomer Huang Lü became the first Chinese woman to work with optics and photographic images. She developed a telescope that could take simple photographic images using photosensitive paper.[54]
1797: English science writer and schoolmistress Margaret Bryan published A Compendious System of Astronomy, including an engraving of herself and her two daughters. She dedicated the book to her students.[59]
1809: Sabina Baldoncelli earned her university degree in pharmacy but was allowed to work only in the Italian orphanage where she resided.[61]
1815: English archaeologist Lady Hester Stanhope used a medieval Italian manuscript to locate a promising archaeological site in Ashkelon, becoming the first archaeologist to begin an excavation in the Palestinian region. It was one of the earliest examples of the use of textual sources in field archaeology.[62]
1830–1837: Belgian botanist Marie-Anne Libert published her four-volume Plantae cryptogamicae des Ardennes, a collection of 400 species of mosses, ferns, lichen, algae and fungi from the Ardennes region. Her contributions to systemic cryptogamic studies were formally recognized by Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III, and Libert received a gold medal of merit.[65]
1833: English phycologistsAmelia Griffiths and Mary Wyatt published two books on local British seaweeds. Griffiths had an internationally respected reputation as a skilled seaweed collector and scholar, and Swedish botanist Carl Agardh had earlier named the seaweed genus Griffithsia in her honour.[67]
1833 Orra White Hitchcock (March 8, 1796 – May 26, 1863) was one of America's earliest women botanical and scientific illustrators and artists, best known for illustrating the scientific works of her husband, geologist Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864), but also notable for her own artistic and scientific work. The most well known appear in her husband's seminal works, the 1833 Report on the Geology, Mineralogy, Botany, and Zoology of Massachusetts and its successor, the 1841 Final Report produced when he was State Geologist. For the 1833 edition, Pendleton's Lithography (Boston) lithographed nine of Hitchcock's Connecticut River Valley drawings and printed them as plates for the work. In 1841, B. W. Thayer and Co., Lithographers (Boston) printed revised lithographs and an additional plate. The hand-colored plate "Autumnal Scenery. View in Amherst" is Hitchcock's most frequently seen work.[68]
1836: Early English geologist and paleontologistEtheldred Benett, known for her extensive collection of several thousand fossils, was appointed a member of the Imperial Natural History Society of Moscow. The society – which only admitted men at the time – initially mistook Benett for a man due to her reputation as a scientist and her unusual first name, addressing her diploma of admission to "Dominum" (Master) Benett.[71][72]
1843: During a nine-month period in 1842–43, English mathematician Ada Lovelace translated Luigi Menabrea's article on Charles Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes.[74] Her notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada Lovelace has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason.[75][76] The engine was never completed, so her program was never tested.[77]
1843: British botanist and pioneering photographer Anna Atkins self-published her book Photographs of British Algae, illustrating the work with cyanotypes. Her book was the first book on any subject to be illustrated by photographs.[78]
1848–1849: English scientist Mary Anne Whitby, a pioneer in western silkworm cultivation, collaborated with Charles Darwin in researching the hereditary qualities of silkworms.[81][82]
1854: Mary Horner Lyell was a conchologist and geologist. She is most well known for her scientific work in 1854, where she studied her collection of land snails from the Canary Islands. She was married to the notable British geologist Charles Lyell and assisted him in his scientific work. It is believed by historians that she likely made major contributions to her husband's work.[84]
1854–1855: Florence Nightingale organized care for wounded soldiers during the Crimean War. She was an English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. Her pie charts clearly showed that most deaths resulted from disease rather than battle wounds or "other causes," which led the general public to demand improved sanitation at field hospitals.[85]
1855: Working with her father, Welsh astronomer and photographer Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn produced some of the earliest photographs of the moon.[86]
1862: Belgian botanist Marie-Anne Libert became the first woman to join the Royal Botanical Society of Belgium. She was named an honorary member.[65]
1863: German naturalist Amalie Dietrich arrived in Australia to collect plant, animal and anthropological specimens for the German Godeffroy Museum. She remained in Australia for the next decade, discovering a number of new plant and animal species in the process, but also became notorious in later years for her removal of Aboriginal skeletons – and the possible incitement of violence against Aboriginal people – for anthropological research purposes.[88][89]
1869/1870: American beekeeper Ellen Smith Tupper became the first female editor of an entomological journal.[91]
1870: Katharine Murray Lyell was a British botanist, author of an early book on the worldwide distribution of ferns, and editor of volumes of the correspondence of several of the era's notable scientists.[92]
1874: Julia Lermontova became the first Russian woman to receive a PhD in chemistry.[94]
1875: Hungarian archaeologist Zsófia Torma excavated the site of Turdaș-Luncă in Hunedoara County, today in Romania. The site, which uncovered valuable prehistoric artifacts, became one of the most important archaeological discoveries in Europe.[95]
1876–1878: American naturalist Mary Treat studied insectivorous plants in Florida. Her contributions to the scientific understanding of how these plants caught and digested prey were acknowledged by Charles Darwin and Asa Gray.[96]
1880: Self-taught German chemist Agnes Pockels began investigating surface tension, becoming a pioneering figure in the field of surface science. The measurement equipment she developed provided the basic foundation for modern quantitative analyses of surface films.[99]
1888: American chemist Josephine Silone Yates was appointed head of the Department of Natural Sciences at Lincoln Institute (later Lincoln University), becoming the first black woman to head a college science department.[107][108]
1890: Austrian-born chemist Ida Freund became the first woman to work as a university chemistry lecturer in the United Kingdom. She was promoted to full lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge.[110]
1892: American psychologist Christine Ladd-Franklin presented her evolutionary theory on the development of colour vision to the International Congress of Psychology. Her theory was the first to emphasize colour vision as an evolutionary trait.[citation needed]
1897: American cytologists and zoologists Katharine Foot and Ella Church Strobell started working as research partners. Together, they pioneered the practice of photographing microscopic research samples and invented a new technique for creating thin material samples in colder temperatures.[125]
1897: American physicist Isabelle Stone became the first woman to receive a PhD in physics in the United States. She wrote her dissertation "On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films" at the University of Chicago.[126][127]
1900: American botanist Anna Murray Vail became the first librarian of the New York Botanical Garden. A key supporter of the institution's establishment, she had earlier donated her entire collection of 3000 botanical specimens to the garden.[132]
1900: Physicists Marie Skłodowska–Curie and Isabelle Stone attended the first International Congress of Physics in Paris, France. They were the only two women out of 836 participants.[127]
1901: American Florence Bascom became the first female geologist to present a paper before the Geological Survey of Washington.[133]
1901: American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon published her first catalog of stellar spectra, which classified stars by temperature. This method was universally and permanently adopted by other astronomers.[135]
1903: Grace Coleridge Frankland née Toynbee was an English microbiologist. Her most notable work was Bacteria in Daily Life. She was one of the nineteen female scientists who wrote the 1904 petition to the Chemical Society to request that they should create some female fellows of the society.[136]
1904: American geographer, geologist and educator Zonia Baber published her article "The Scope of Geography", in which she laid out her educational theories on the teaching of geography. She argued that students required a more interdisciplinary, experiential approach to learning geography: instead of a reliance on textbooks, students needed field-trips, lab work and map-making knowledge. Baber's educational ideas transformed the way schools taught geography.[140]
1904: Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (15 October 1880 – 2 October 1958) was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant palaeontology and coal classification. She held the post of Lecturer in Palaeobotany at the University of Manchester from 1904 to 1910; in this capacity she became the first female academic of that university.[142] In 1909 she was elected to the Linnean Society of London. She was 26 at the time of her election to Fellowship (the youngest woman admitted at that time).
1906: Following the San Francisco earthquake, American botanist and curator Alice Eastwood rescued almost 1500 rare plant specimens from the burning California Academy of Sciences building. Her curation system of keeping type specimens separate from other collections – unconventional at the time – allowed her to quickly find and retrieve the specimens.[146]
1906: Russian chemist Irma Goldberg published a paper on two newly discovered chemical reactions involving the presence of copper and the creation of a nitrogen-carbon bond to an aromatic halide. These reactions were subsequently named the Goldberg reaction and the Jourdan-Ullman-Goldberg reaction.[147]
1906: After her death, English lepidopteristEmma Hutchinson's collection of 20,000 butterflies and moths was donated to the London Natural History Museum. She had published little during her lifetime, and was barred from joining local scientific societies due to her gender, but was honoured for her work when a variant form of the comma butterfly was named hutchinsoni.[149]
1909: Danish physicist Kirstine Meyer became the first Danish woman to receive a doctorate degree in natural sciences. She wrote her dissertation on the topic of "the development of the temperature concept" within the history of physics.[128]
1911: Polish-born physicist and chemist Marie Curie became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which she received "[for] the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".[153][154][155] This made her the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice. As of 2022, she is the only woman to win it twice and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.
1912: American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied the bright-dim cycle periods of Cepheid stars, then found a way to calculate the distance from such stars to Earth.[153]
1912: Canadian botanist and geneticist Carrie Derick was appointed a professor of morphological botany at McGill University. She was the first woman to become a full professor in any department at a Canadian university.[157]
1913: Regina Fleszarowa became the first Polish woman to receive a PhD in natural sciences.[158]
1913: Izabela Textorisová, the first Slovakian female botanist, published "Flora Data from the County of Turiec" in the journal Botanikai Közlemények. Her work uncovered more than 100 previously unknown species of plants from the Turiec area.[159]
1914–1918: During World War I, a team of seven British women chemists conducted pioneering research on chemical antidotes and weaponized gases. The project leader, Martha Whiteley, was awarded the Order of the British Empire for her wartime contributions.[161]
1914-1918: Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, GBE (née Fraser) was a prominent English botanist and mycologist. For her wartime service she was the first woman to be awarded a military DBE in January 1918. She served as Commandant of the Women's Royal Air Force (WRAF) from September 1918 until December 1919.[162]
1914: British-born mycologist Ethel Doidge became the first woman in South Africa to receive a doctorate in any subject, receiving her doctorate of science degree from the University of the Good Hope. She wrote her thesis on "A bacterial disease of mango".[163]
1916: Chika Kuroda became the first Japanese woman to earn a bachelor of science degree, studying chemistry at the Tohoku Imperial University. After graduation, she was subsequently appointed an assistant professor at the university.[165]
1917: American zoologistMary J. Rathbun received her PhD from the George Washington University. Despite never having attended college – or any formal schooling beyond high school – Rathbun had authored more than 80 scientific publications, described over 674 new species of crustacean, and developed a system for crustacean-related records at the Smithsonian Museum.[166]
1919: Dutch biologist and geneticist Jantina Tammes became the university professor in the Netherlands. She was appointed an extraordinary professor of variability and heredity at the University of Groningen. She became the first person in the Netherlands to occupy a chair in genetic. Moreover, she became the second female professor in the country, and the first one at the University of Groningen. She held this position until 1937, when she resigned at the age of sixty-six.[167]
1920: Louisa Bolus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa for her contributions to botany. Over the course of her lifetime, Bolus identified and named more than 1,700 new South African plant species – more species than any other botanist in South Africa.[171]
1921: Edelmira Inés Mórtola (1894–1973), the first woman to become a geologist in Argentina was awarded her PHD at the University of Buenos Aires, the first woman to received her doctorate there. The University named the Mórtola Minerology Museum in her honor.[172]
1923: María Teresa Ferrari, an Argentine physician, earned the first diploma awarded to a woman by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris for her studies of the urinary tract.[173]
1925: Mexican-American botanist Ynes Mexia embarked on her first botanical expedition into Mexico, collecting over 1500 plant specimens. Over the course of the next thirteen years, Mexia collected more than 145,000 specimens from Mexico, Alaska, and multiple South American countries. She discovered 500 new species.[174]
1925: British-American astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin established that hydrogen is the most common element in stars, and thus the most abundant element in the universe.[176]
1932: Michiyo Tsujimura became the first Japanese woman to earn a doctorate in agriculture. She studied at the Tokyo Imperial University, and her doctoral thesis was entitled "On the Chemical Components of Green Tea".[187]
1933: American bacteriologist Ruth Ella Moore became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in the natural sciences, completing her doctorate in bacteriology at Ohio State University.[190]
1939: Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner, along with Otto Hahn, led the small group of scientists who first discovered nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron; the results were published in early 1939.[207][208]
1940: Turkish Archaeologist, Sumerologist, Assyriologist, and writer Muazzez İlmiye Çığ. Upon receiving her degree in 1940, she began a multi-decade career at Museum of the Ancient Orient, one of three such institutions comprising Istanbul Archaeology Museums, as a resident specialist in the field of cuneiformtablets, thousands of which were being stored untranslated and unclassified in the facility's archives. In the intervening years, due to her efforts in the deciphering and publication of the tablets, the Museum became a Middle Eastern languages learning center attended by ancient history researchers from every part of the world.[210]
1941: American scientist Ruth Smith Lloyd became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in anatomy.[211]
1942: Native American aerospace engineer Mary Golda Ross became employed at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, where she provided troubleshooting for military aircraft. She went on to work for NASA, developing operational requirements, flight plans, and a Planetary Flight Handbook for spacecraft missions such as the Apollo program.[214]
1943: British geologist Eileen Guppy was promoted to the rank of assistant geologist, therefore becoming the first female geology graduate appointed to the scientific staff of the British Geological Survey.[215]
1943: American geologist and crystallographer Elizabeth Armstrong Wood became the first female to be hired as a Member of the Technical Staff (MTS) at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ.[216]
1947: American biochemist Marie Maynard Daly became the first African-American woman to complete a PhD in chemistry in the United States. She completed her dissertation, entitled "A Study of the Products Formed by the Action of Pancreatic Amylase on Corn Starch" at Columbia University.[223]
1947: Berta Karlik, an Austrian physicist, was awarded the Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for her discovery of astatine.[224]
1948: American limnologist Ruth Patrick of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia led a multidisciplinary team of scientists on an extensive pollution survey of the Conestoga River watershed in Pennsylvania.[226] Patrick would become a leading authority on the ecological effects of river pollution, receiving the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1975.[227]
1949: Botanist Valida Tutayug [az] became the first Azerbaijani woman to receive a PhD in biological studies. She went on to write the first national Azerbaijani-language textbooks on botany and biology.[228]
1950s: Chinese-American medical scientist Tsai-Fan Yu co-founded a clinic at Mount Sinai Medical Center for the study and treatment of gout. Working with Alexander B. Gutman, Yu established that levels of uric acid were a factor in the pain experienced by gout patients, and subsequently developed multiple effective drugs for the treatment of gout.[233]
1952: American computer scientist Grace Hopper completed what is considered to be the first compiler, a program that allows a computer user to use a human-readable high-level programming language instead of machine code. It was known as the A-0 compiler.[244]
1955: Japanese geochemist Katsuko Saruhashi published her research on measuring carbonic acid levels in seawater. The paper included "Saruhashi's Table", a tool of measurement she had developed that focused on using water temperature, pH level, and chlorinity to determine carbonic acid levels. Her work contributed to global understanding of climate change, and Saruhashi's Table was used by oceanographers for the next 30 years.[258]
1955–1956: Soviet marine biologist Maria Klenova became the first female scientist to work in the Antarctic, conducting research and assisting in the establishment of the Mirny Antarctic station.[259]
1956: Canadian zoologist and feminist Anne Innis Dagg began pioneering behavioural research on wild giraffes in South Africa in Kruger National Park. She researched and published on feminism and anti-nepotism laws at academic institutions in North America.
1956: Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu conducted a nuclear physics experiment in collaboration with the Low Temperature Group of the US National Bureau of Standards. It was an important foundation for the Standard Model in particle physics and brought the first answer to the question of the universe's existence by virtue of matter's predominance over antimatter.[260] The experiment, becoming known as the Wu experiment, showed that parity could be violated in weak interaction.[261] The Nobel Prize was given only to her male colleagues soon after the headlines of the discovery were released.
1959: Chinese astronomer Ye Shuhua led the development of the Joint Chinese Universal Time System, which became the Chinese national standard for measuring universal time.[265]
1960: British primatologistJane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in Tanzania; her study of them continued for over 50 years. Her observations challenged previous ideas that only humans made tools and that chimpanzees had a basically vegetarian diet.[268][269]
1964: American mathematician Irene Stegun completed the work which led to the publication of Handbook of Mathematical Functions, a widely used and widely cited reference work in applied mathematics.
1965: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to receive a Ph.D. in computer science.[282] Her thesis was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns".[283]
1967: South African radiobiologist Tikvah Alper discovered that scrapie, an infectious brain disease affecting sheep, did not spread via DNA or RNA like a viral or bacterial disease. The discovery enabled scientists to better understand diseases caused by prions.[286][287]
1967: Yvonne Brill, a Canadian-American rocket and jet propulsion engineer, invented the hydrazineresistojet propulsion system.
1970: Polish geologist Franciszka Szymakowska became widely known because of her unique and detailed geological drawings that are still used today.[292]
1973: American physicist Anna Coble became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in biophysics, completing her dissertation at University of Illinois.[293]
1976: Filipino-American microbiologist Roseli Ocampo-Friedmann traveled to the Antarctic with Imre Friedmann and discovered micro-organisms living within the porous rock of the Ross Desert. These organisms – cryptoendoliths – were observed surviving extremely low temperatures and humidity, assisting scientific research into the possibility of life on Mars.[299]
1977: Friederike Victoria Joy Adamson (née Gessner, 20 January 1910 – 3 January 1980) was a naturalist, artist and author. Her book, Born Free, an international bestseller, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. It was made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.[303]
1977: Argentine-Canadian scientist Veronica Dahl became the first graduate at Université d'Aix-Marseille II (and one of the first women in the world) to earn a PhD in artificial intelligence.[305]
1977: Canadian-American Elizabeth Stern published her research on the link between birth control pills – which contained high levels of estrogen at the time – and the increased risk of cervical cancer development in women. Her data helped pressure the pharmaceutical industry into providing safer contraceptive pills with lower hormone doses.[306]
1980: Nigerian geophysicist Deborah Ajakaiye became the first woman in any West African country to be appointed a full professor of physics.[312][313] Over the course of her scientific career, she became the first female Fellow elected to the Nigerian Academy of Science, and the first female dean of science in Nigeria.[314]
1985: After identifying HIV as the cause of AIDS, Chinese-American virologist Flossie Wong-Staal became the first scientist to clone and genetically map the HIV virus, enabling the development of the first HIV blood screening tests.[327]
1988: American scientist and inventor Patricia Bath (born 1942) became the first African-American to patent a medical device, namely the Laserphaco Probe for improving the use of lasers to remove cataracts.[330]
1992: Mae Carol Jemison is an American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut. She became the first black woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Jemison joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1987 and was selected to serve for the STS-47 mission, during which she orbited the Earth for nearly eight days on September 12–20, 1992.[334]
1992: Edith M. Flanigen became the first woman awarded the Perkin Medal (widely considered the highest honor in American industrial chemistry) for her outstanding achievements in applied chemistry.[335][336] The medal especially recognized her syntheses of aluminophosphate and silicoaluminophosphate molecular sieves as new classes of materials.[336]
1995: British geomorphologist Marjorie Sweeting published the first comprehensive Western account of China's karst, entitled Karst in China: its Geomorphology and Environment.[338][339]
1996: American planetary scientist Margaret G. Kivelson led a team that discovered the first subsurface, saltwater ocean on an alien world, on the Jovian moon Europa.[343][344]
1997: Lithuanian-Canadian primatologist Birutė Galdikas received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement for her research and rehabilitation work with orangutans. Her work with orangutans, eventually spanning over 30 years, was later recognized in 2014 as one of the longest continuous scientific studies of wild animals in history.[345]
2000: Venezuelan astrophysicist Kathy Vivas presented her discovery of approximately 100 "new and very distant" RR Lyrae stars, providing insight into the structure and history of the Milky Way galaxy.[351]
2003: American geophysicist Claudia Alexander oversaw the final stages of Project Galileo, a space exploration mission that ended at the planet Jupiter.[352]
2006: Chinese-American biochemist Yizhi Jane Tao led a team of researchers to become the first to map the atomic structure of Influenza A, contributing to antiviral research.[355][356]
2006: Merieme Chadid became the first Moroccan person and the first female astronomer to travel to Antarctica, leading an international team of scientists in the installation of a major observatory in the South Pole.[358]
2006: American computer scientist Frances E. Allen won the Turing Award for "pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution". She was the first woman to win the award.[359]
2007: Using satellite imagery, Egyptian geomorphologist Eman Ghoneim discovered traces of an 11,000-year-old mega lake in the Sahara Desert. The discovery shed light on the origins of the largest modern groundwater reservoir in the world.[361]
2008: American-born Australian Penny Sackett became Australia's first female Chief Scientist.[364]
2008: American computer scientist Barbara Liskov won the Turing Award for "contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing".[365]
2009: Chinese geneticist Zeng Fanyi and her research team published their experiment results proving that induced pluripotent stem cells can be used to generate whole mammalian bodies – in this case, live mice.[368]
2010s
2010: Marcia McNutt became the first female director of the United States Geological Survey.[369]
2011: Kazakhstani neuroscience student and computer hacker Alexandra Elbakyan launched Sci-Hub, a website that provides users with pirated copies of scholarly scientific papers. Within five years, Sci-Hub grew to contain 60 million papers and recorded over 42 million annual downloads by users. Elbakyan was finally sued by major academic publishing company Elsevier, and Sci-Hub was subsequently taken down, but it reappeared under different domain names.[370]
2011: Taiwanese-American astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma led a team of scientists in discovering two of the largest black holes ever observed.[371]
2015: Asha de Vos became the first Sri Lankan person to receive a PhD in marine mammal research, completing her thesis on "Factors influencing blue whale aggregations off southern Sri Lanka" at the University of Western Australia.[382][383]
2018: British astrophysicists Hiranya Peiris and Joanna Dunkley and Italian cosmologist Licia Verde were among 27 scientists awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their contributions to "detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies".[385]
2018: British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell received the special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her scientific achievements and "inspiring leadership", worth $3 million. She donated the entirety of the prize money towards the creation of scholarships to assist women, underrepresented minorities and refugees who are pursuing the study of physics.[386]
2019: Imaging scientist Katie Bouman developed an algorithm that made the first visualization of a black hole possible using the Event Horizon Telescope. She was part of the team of over 200 people who implemented the project.[393][394][395][396]
2023: Australian geomicrobiologist Jillian Banfield became the first female recipient of the van Leeuwenhoek Medal, which she received for her studies of complex microbial communities and their interaction with the environment.[404]
^O'Neill, Eileen (2001). Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. p. xi. ISBN978-0521776752.
^Detlefsen, Karen (2017), "Émilie du Châtelet", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2018-09-01
^Bret, Patrice; Kawashima, Keiko (2019). "Madame Lavoisier's Diffusion and Defense of Oxygen Against Phlogiston: Her Translations of Richard Kirwan's Essays". In Lykknes, Annette; Van Tiggelen, Brigitte (eds.). Women in Their Element: Selected Women's Contributions To The Periodic System. Singapore: World Scientific.
^Cole, Ellen (2013). Women's Work: A Survey of Scholarship By and About Women. Routledge. pp. 55–56. ISBN9781136376276.
^Katz, Victor (2009). "Chapter 23: Probability and Statistics in the Nineteenth Century". A History of Mathematics: An Introduction. Addison-Wesley. pp. 828–30. ISBN978-0-321-38700-4.
^Birks, J. L. (2005). "The Penllergare Observatory". The Antiquarian Astronomer. 2: 3–8. Bibcode:2005AntAs...2....3B.
^Coltofean, Laura (January 2017). Szabó, Cs.; Rusu-Bolindeț, V.; Rustoiu, G. T.; Gligor, M. (eds.). "Adalbert Cserni and His Contemporaries. The Pioneers of Alba Iulia and Beyond". In: Cs. Szabó, V. Rusu-Bolindeț, G. T. Rustoiu, M. Gligor (Eds.): Adalbert Cserni and His Contemporaries. The Pioneers of Alba Iulia and Beyond. Mega Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca, 2017, P. 327-354. Cluj-Napoca: Mega Publishing House: 327–354. 2017. Zsófia Torma: A pioneer of prehistoric archaeology in nineteenth-century Transylvania
^Clary, R. M. (2007). "Great expectations: Florence Bascom (1842–1945) and the education of early US women geologists". Geological Society, London, Special Publications. 281 (1): 123–135. Bibcode:2007GSLSP.281..123C. doi:10.1144/SP281.8. S2CID128838892.
^ abStamhuis, Ida H. (1995). "A Female Contribution to Early Genetics: Tine Tammes and Mendel's Laws for Continuous Characters". Journal of the History of Biology. 28 (3): 495–531. doi:10.1007/BF01059390. JSTOR4331365. PMID11609021. S2CID42785250.
^Ne'eman, Yuval (1999). The Impact of Emmy Noether's Theorems on XXIst Century Physics in Teicher. Teicher. pp. 83–101.
^ abcTetty, Charles (1985). "Medical Practitioners of African Descent in Colonial Ghana". The International Journal of African Historical Studies. 18 (1): 139–144. doi:10.2307/217977. JSTOR217977. PMID11617203. S2CID7298703.
^"Concepción Mendizábal Mendoza". Instituto de investigaciones Históricas Políticas Económicas y Sociales (in Spanish). 2018-08-08. Retrieved 2020-03-27.
^"Michiyo Tsujimura". Ochanomizu University Digital Archives. Retrieved 2018-08-23.
^Dazinger, Walter (27 January 2014). "Preisträger des Haitinger-Preises 1905–1936"(PDF) (in German). Institut für Angewandte Synthesechemie, Vienna, Austria: Die Ignaz-Lieben-Gesellschaft Verein zur Förderung der Wissenschaftsgeschichte. p. 3. Archived from the original(PDF) on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 25 March 2016.
^Rentetzi, Maria (1 March 2009). "Marietta Blau (1894–1970)". JWA.org. Brookline, Massachusetts: Jewish Women's Archive. Archived from the original on 12 October 2016. Retrieved 23 August 2018.
^Meitner, L.; Frisch, O. R. (1939). "Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: A New Type of Nuclear Reaction". Nature. 143 (3615): 239. Bibcode:1939Natur.143..239M. doi:10.1038/143239a0.. Meitner is identified as being at the Physical Institute, Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. Frisch is identified as being at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Copenhagen.
^Frisch, O. R. (1939). "Physical Evidence for the Division of Heavy Nuclei under Neutron Bombardment". Nature. 143 (3616): 276. Bibcode:1939Natur.143..276F. doi:10.1038/143276a0. [The experiment for this letter to the editor was conducted on 13 January 1939; see Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb pp. 263, 268 (Simon and Schuster, 1986).]
^Science, Live (2013-09-11). "What is Francium?". Livescience.com. Retrieved 2018-08-20.
^"Berta Karlik" (in German). Vienna, Austria: Universität Wien Projekt Lise. 2010. Archived from the original on 8 April 2017. Retrieved 10 January 2016.
^Lederberg, E. M., 1950, "Lysogenicity in Escherichia coli strain K-12", Microbial Genetics Bulletin 1, pp. 5–9, January 1950, University of Wisconsin (Evelyn Maisel Witkin, Editor), Ohio State University, ISSN0026-2579, call No. 33-M-4, OCLC04079516, Accession Number: AEH8282UW" http://www.estherlederberg.com/Censorship/LambdaW.html
^Rubin, Vera; Ford, Jr., W. Kent (February 1970). "Rotation of the Andromeda Nebula from a Spectroscopic Survey of Emission Regions". The Astrophysical Journal. 159: 379–403. Bibcode:1970ApJ...159..379R. doi:10.1086/150317. S2CID122756867.
^Mejía Perdomo, Odalis (2013). "Idelisa Bonnelly – Dominican Republic"(PDF). Women Scientists in the Americas: their inspiring stories. The Inter-American Network of Academies of Sciences. pp. 97–105. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2018-10-08. Retrieved 2018-10-07.
^García, Richard (2013). "María Teresa Ruiz – Chile"(PDF). Women Scientists in the Americas: their inspiring stories. The Inter-American Network of Academies of Sciences. pp. 67–80. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2016-08-17. Retrieved 2018-10-07.
^Akyeampong, Emmanuel Kwaku; Niven, Mr Steven J. (2012-02-02). "Merieme Chadid". Dictionary of African Biography. Open University Press USA. pp. 54–55. ISBN9780195382075.
.jpg)
.png)
_-_Science_Service_-_Original.jpg)
,_lecturing_at_Catholic_University,_Washington,_D.C.,_1946.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
_in_1958.jpg)
,_1967.jpg)
.jpg)
