Beatrice Alice Hicks was the first woman engineer to be hired by Western Electric, and co-founder and first president of the Society of Women Engineers. Despite starting her career at a time when engineering was seen as inappropriate choice for women, Hicks held various leadership positions and eventually became the owner of an engineering firm. Hicks also developed a gas density switch that would be used by NASA, including the Apollo moon landing missions.
Professor Sue Serjeantson was a respected geneticist in the Australian National University’s John Curtin School of Medical Research. Her research focused on inherited susceptibility to disease and the human immune response to organ transplantation. She was the first woman to be the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at ANU.
Dr Margaret Clark practiced medicine in remote areas of Western Australia at Lake Grace, often working under difficult conditions. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire on 9 June 1949 for her services to medicine in isolated areas. A piece in The West Australian on 9 June 1949, noted that ‘she has ministered to isolated patients in a wide area, travelling in all weathers over lonely and difficult roads. She has preferred to remain at Lake Grace rather than move to another centre where the amenities would be much superior’. She was also a founding member of the Lake Grace branch of the Country Women’s Association.
Hertha Wambacher was an Austrian physicist who studied first chemistry, then physics at the University of Vienna.
Wambacher’s dissertation at the 2nd Physics Institute was supervised by Marietta Blau, with whom Wambacher would continue to collaborate after completing her Ph.D. in 1932. They worked together on the photographic method of detecting ionizing particles. Blau and Wambacher received the Lieben Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1937, for their studies at Vienna’s Institute for Radium Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. That same year, Blau and Wambacher jointly discovered “disintegration stars” in photographic plates that had been exposed to cosmic radiation at an altitude of 2300 m above sea level. These figures are the patterns of particle tracks from nuclear reactions (spallation events) of cosmic-ray particles with nuclei of the photographic emulsion.
Janet Graeme Travell was an American physician and medical researcher. She was the first woman to be appointed as the presidential physician, by John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Dr. Marietta Blau was an Austrian physicist who did pioneering work with the pion, a subatomic particle that is made up of quarks and antiquarks. Even though Dr. Erwin Schrodinger nominated Blau and her colleague Dr. Hertha Wambacher, for the Nobel Prize, the committee instead, awarded the prize to Dr. Cecil Powell for work that utilized Dr. Blau’s discoveries.
Dr Agnes Elizabeth Lloyd Bennett OBE was a New Zealand doctor. She served as the Chief Medical Officer of a medical unit during World War I and was later awarded an O.B.E. for her services in improving the health of women and children.
Kitty O’Brien Joyner joined the NACA, the precursor to NASA, in 1939 as an electrical engineer after graduating from the University of Virginia (UVA). She was the first woman to graduate from UVA’s engineering program and the NACA’s first female engineer. Joyner spent her career working in and managing wind tunnels and supersonic flight research.
Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist and professor in the areas of language and cognition. She is an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California San Diego and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She previously taught at MIT and at Stanford. Her research is on the relationships between mind, world and language (or how humans get so smart).
Boroditsky was named one of 25 visionaries changing the world by the Utne Reader, and is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell scholar, recipient of an NSF Career award and an APA Distinguished Scientist lecturer.