Jesmyn Ward is the acclaimed author of the novels “Where the Line Bleeds,” “Salvage the Bones,” winner of the 2011 National Book Award, and “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” winner of the 2017 National Book Award. Her nonfiction work includes the memoir “Men We Reaped,” a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2020 work “Navigate Your Stars.”
Social psychologist whose research has illuminated how identities – particularly racial identities – are formed and shaped through interactions with others.
Founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund and an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life.
Jacqueline Barton probes DNA by shooting electrons through it. Using custom-built molecules to direct these electrical currents, she can locate genes, see how they are arranged, and scan them for damage.
Barton hopes that these techniques will lead to new ways to diagnose diseases and treat them through DNA repair. To further this end she cofounded GeneOhm Sciences in 2001, which became part of Becton, Dickinson and Company in 2006.
In 1983, at the age of 81, she received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on “mobile genetic elements,” that is, genetic transposition, or the ability of genes to change position on the chromosome. McClintock was the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.
Decades before the #BlackLivesMatter movement stamped itself into our collective psyche, Carrie Mae Weems was living its message by example through provocative artwork about racial representation.
Amy Smith is an inventor, teacher and founder of MIT D-Lab and Senior Lecturer of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.
Loretta Ross is an academic and activist who has dedicated many years to advocating for women’s rights and reproductive justice. Most notably, she is a cofounder of SisterSong and Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, served as a previous Executive Director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, and is one of twelve women credited with coining the phrase and framework “reproductive justice.”
Julia B Robinson worked on computability, decision problems and non-standard models of arithmetic.
Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgium mathematician and physicist who has done important work on wavelets in image compression. She is on the Board of Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education, an organisation which helps women get advanced degrees in mathematics.