Ruth Boynton was a physician, researcher, and administrator who spent almost her entire career at the University of Minnesota (U of M). She worked in public health and student health services at a time (the mid-twentieth century) when there were few women in either of those fields.
After graduating from Northwestern Hospital’s School of Nursing in 1894, Theresa Ericksen led a life of service as a healer, teacher, and promoter of public health and nursing education. Her legacy has ties to the Minnesota Nursing Association, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Christmas Seals, and Fort Snelling National Cemetery.
Nisei activist who was the community liaison between the Japanese community and the military government in Hawai’i during World War II. She later supported community causes for the elderly like Project Dana.
Dr. S. Josephine Baker became the first director of the New York City Bureau of Child Hygiene, the first such bureau in the country, in 1908. In 1917, she was the first woman to earn a doctorate in public health from the New York University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College.
In 1901, Dr. Dorothy Reed Mendenhall discovered the blood cell disorder characteristic of Hodgkin’s disease, known as the Reed cell (sometimes the Reed-Sternberg).
Dr. Joanne Harley Lynn leads Altarum Institute’s Center on Elder Care and Advanced Illness. Previously, she was director of The Washington Home Center for Palliative Care Studies, in Washington, D.C. She was also a senior scientist for RAND, a nonprofit institution that seeks to improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis, and a clinical professor of medicine at The George Washington University, as well as president of Americans for Better Care of the Dying, a nonprofit public advocacy group that seeks to improve Medicare and Medicaid and other aspects of federal health policy.
She worked tirelessly to convince Model Cities to develop a Central District Pediatric Clinic in Seattle.
Monica McLemore is one of the leading scholars in the field of anti-racist birth equity research, as well as in community-informed methods and policy translation.
American birth control advocate
Erin Waters is a healthcare educator and activist with a focus on the Black and Indigenous queer community.