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.
Karen Uhlenbeck is an American mathematician who is a leading expert on partial differential equations.
Lene Hau is a Danish physicist and mathematician. She has led a team at Harvard University who have slowed light and in 2001 succeeded in stopping a beam of light. This has important applications to quantum computing.
Sandra Cisneros has won multiple awards, fellowships, and honors as an internationally recognized writer. On September 22, 2016, President Barack Obama presented Cisneros with the National Medal of Arts for her work. Her book called The House on Mango Street, has sold over six million copies and has been translated into over twenty languages.
Whilst Mehretu’s art is inspired by events taking place in Africa and the Middle East, she resists interpretations of her work that fail to see past her ethnicity. According to the artist, her work is not all about “blackness” or “otherness.” She believes that there is a failure to “simply accept and understand that a woman of African descent is making large, abstract paintings” and that this is a restrictive view of what artists of color can achieve.