I always complain so today I’d like to say something positive. I got through the wash day of ChIP and got a western to primary antibody before 1pm! That’s pretty awesome. So, some days are still exciting
Today’s FYFD video tells a story I’ve wanted to share for a couple of years now. It’s about the life and work of Agnes Pockels, a woman born in the mid-nineteenth century who, despite a lack of formal scientific training, made major contributions to the understanding of surface tension and to the experimental apparatuses and methodologies used in surface chemistry in general. She accomplished all of this not in a scientific lab, but from her kitchen.
Pockels’ story is one of curiosity, determination, and meticulous scientific inquiry. Chances are that you’ve never heard of her, but you really should. Check out the full video below to learn more! (Image and video credit: N. Sharp)
It’s #InternationalWomensDay – here’s a set of cards featuring 100 incredible #WomenInChemistry View the full set here: bit.ly/WomenInChem2021 #IWD #IWD2021 https://ift.tt/3cfptk2
20 years ago, Stephanie Kwolek became only the fourth woman to enter the US National Inventors Hall of Fame, 30 years after she first synthesised a material for the purpose of making strong but light tyres.
That material is now used in more than 200 different applications. It protects undersea optical cables, suspends bridges with ultra-strong ropes and creates super-taut drumheads. But Kevlar is perhaps best known for saving countless lives as a protective material in bulletproof vests and helmets.
Kwolek, a chemist at American company DuPont, created a solution of para-phenylenediamine and terephthaloyl chloride in 1965 that was ‘cloudy, opalescent upon being stirred and of low viscosity’. Polymer solutions are normally syrupy, but Kwolek’s was thin and watery.
DuPont technician Charles Smullen refused to run the solution through a spinneret, the apparatus used to spin a polymer solution into a fibre, saying it was too watery and interpreting the opalescence as particles that would clog the machine. Thankfully, Kwolek was persistent, and Smullen agreed to spin the fibre.
‘We spun it, and it span beautifully,’ Kwolek beamed in a 2012 interview. ‘It was very strong and stiff – unlike anything we had made before. I knew that I had made a discovery. I didn’t shout “Eureka!” but I was very excited, as was the whole laboratory excited, and management was excited, because we were looking for something new. Something different. And this was it.’
The high tensile strength-to-weight ratio of Kevlar is five times that of steel. When layered together, it can absorb the velocity of shrapnel or a bullet, distributing its force across the fibres instead of being pierced. It is used in tennis rackets, skis, boats, ropes and cables and, as first intended, in tyres.
Kwolek, who also developed the nylon rope trick classroom demonstration, died in 2014 at the age of 90, having lived to see her invention take more forms than she could have possibly anticipated. Kwolek’s was a rare discovery with perhaps the most rewarding property a material can possess. As she put it, ‘I don’t think there’s anything like saving someone’s life to bring you satisfaction and happiness.’
Hopping on the #girlswithtoys party this morning while doing some mechanical tests. This toy is huge, noisy, and has some powerful hydraulic components.
Sir Tim Hunt resigns from UCL over women in science comment
One female scientist took to twitter to share her #distractinglysexy pose
The Nobel laureate faced a backlash of criticism following his comments at a recent World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea, he said, ‘Three things happen when they are in the lab – you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry.’
UCL confirmed that Hunt had resigned on Wednesday from his position as honorary professor with the UCL Faculty of Life Sciences, following his comment.
Hunt has since apologised for any offence, saying he meant the remarks to be humorous – but added that he ‘did mean the part about having trouble with girls’.
Following Hunt’s comments, female scientist have hit back with a Twitter campaign mocking his sexist comments. The hashtag #DistractinglySexy is being used by women working in the fields of science to show exactly what their jobs entail and posting pictures to show just how “distracting” they are while doing it.
Have any of you had a #distractinglysexy moment in the lab? Tweet us @materialsworld
To find out more on materials science, packaging and engineering news, visit our website IOM3 or follow us on Twitter @MaterialsWorld for regular news updates.
MeetHeidy Cruz, polymer chemist and chemical engineer
1) What do you do?
I develop polymer-based materials tailored for nutrient recovery from domestic wastewater. Climate change, energy issues, limits in resource availability, and end of life of current infrastructures are driving a shift in societal production systems from linear to circular economy. Recovery of nutrients from used water has gained significant interest in the academic world, the water industry, and policy makers.
The goal of my research is to develop new technology for a more sustainable nitrogen recovery process from domestic wastewater– cutting back greenhouse gas emissions and providing a platform for a circular economy in the field of wastewater treatment.
2) Where do you work?
I’m in the 2nd year of my PhD at The University of Queensland in Australia. I work in two centers:
Center for Solid Waste Bioprocessing, Civil Engineering
Polymer Translational Research Group, Chemical Engineering
3) Tell us about the photos!
[Top:] At work at our laboratory at the Center for Solid Waste Bioprocessing
[Bottom:] By the lake inside campus– I always come here to relax my mind when research gets tough
4) Tell us about your academic career path so far.
HS: Statefields School Inc, Philippines (2007)
BS: University of Santo Tomas, Philippines (2012)
MS: Kongju University, South Korea (2016)
PhD: The University of Queensland, Australia (ongoing)
I’ve always wanted to pursue a research degree in another country to test my capabilities and expand my horizon. Luckily, I received a full scholarship from Kongju National University in South Korea where I did my Masters of Science in Advanced Materials Engineering. In July 2016, six months after graduation, I started my PhD. God-willing, I’ll be a doctor before I turn 30!
5) Anything else you’d like to share?
There are only a handful of us in the global arena, or at least here in Australia, but I believe that Filipino scientists are truly talented and globally competitive. I hope more Filipinos will be encouraged to pursue research and contribute the knowledge to the advancement of science and technology in the Philippines.
There is a common perception that scientists are still sitting in ivory towers– but times have changed. It’s a career that needs the same perseverance and collaboration as any other profession. The only difference is that scientists need to maintain a healthy dose of idealism that we can really change the world one data point at a time.
72-year-old British Nobel laureate Sir Tim Hunt has a distinct opinion about female scientists’ role in the lab: Namely, that they are distracting, emotional and shouldn’t work alongside men. Thankfully, Vagenda and others on Twitter are here to show him how wrong he is.
Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt told a room full of journalists that the trouble with “girls” in the lab is that “they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.”
Ocean alien - this mesmerizing creature is glaucus atlanticus, or the “blue dragon” nudibranch. Rather than crawl along the seafloor like other sea slugs however, these little dragons really do soar across the seas - those winglike appendages create surface tension that allows them to adhere to the underside of the water’s surface, with currents and wind patterns carrying them across large distances. Despite this grand way of living, g. atlanticus only reaches up to a few centimeters long!
ADELAIDE AMES was a twentieth-century lady astronomer full of the awesome.
She completed her undergraduate education at Vassar College before graduating from Radcliffe College (the first woman at Radcliffe to receive an M.A. in Astronomy!) in 1924. While at Harvard, she and Harlow Shapley worked together to complete the Shapley-Ames catalog, which listed galaxies brighter than the 13th magnitude and whose data challenged the assumption of the universe’s isotropy.
At the age of 32, Ames drowned in a boating accident. Her friend and fellow astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin remembered her as “young, lovely, and intensely vital” and “the closest friend [she] ever made at the Observatory.”[1]
Who’s coming to our 2nd birthday party? Fossil Hunter Lottie!
Almost unbelievably, TrowelBlazers is now a whole two years old- crazy as we still feel sort of like ‘newbies’, yet at the same time we’ve done so much, and it feels like we’ve all known each other much longer.
Over the past year there has been a wonderful assortment of TB-related activities, some of which we already talked about on our 2014 review. But even just in the past few months of 2015, we’ve been rocking it (yes, that was a geological pun).
And now, the Big Event you’ve all been waiting for: an actual TrowelBlazers doll is being launched! Fossil Hunter Lottie was made in collaboration on a voluntary basis after we were approached by manufactures Arklu, who wanted advice on making sure their palaeontology action figure was realistic. So we tweaked a few things about her field clothes, made sure she had a trowel and a geological hammer, suggested the packaging design, wrote some extra content on real life trowelblazers and safe fossil hunting, and worked out some fun launch plans.
Lottie came with us to America, on a fossil hunt with children on the Jurassic Coast where Mary Anning worked, and this week went on a UK #RealFossilHunter tour to meet palaeontologists and find out about the diversity of their careers. You can check it out our BRAND NEW YOUTUBE CHANNEL!!!
It was almost a disaster. For 5 whole days Fossil Hunter Lottie appeared to be lost in the post. But a spot of sleuthing and a few phone calls later, and PHEW! She turned up safe and sound in the University of Leeds post room, ready for her next adventure on the Real Fossil Hunter UK tour… spending the day at work with micropalaeontologist Dr Tracy Aze!
Read about Tracy’s (& Fossil Hunter Lottie’s) day in our latest #realfossilhunter post here – it also has the #girlswithtoys hashtag totally covered…
And don’t forget, if you want to win your own Fossil Hunter Lottie Doll, sharing and liking this post will enter you in our prize draw!
After her grueling conference schedule in San Francisco was over (all the talks given, people met, apple juice drunk), Fossil Hunter Lottie decided to get out On The Road, and headed off to NorCal with Becky for a mini-tour of some of the most amazing ancient plants on earth.
California is probably most often associated with the glitz of Hollywood and LA, but it also sparkles with some truly astonishing landscapes, wildlife, geology, and fossils. With only two weeks (and a nearly 14-month old party-member), this road trip wasn’t epic in mileage, but we did see some fantastic stuff, including some Awfully Old Trees.
The countdown has begun! On May 21st we’ll be celebrating Mary Anning’s birthday with the official launch of a doll inspired by her: Fossil Hunter Lottie.
TrowelBlazers has worked closely with Lottie Dolls to make a doll that we hope will encourage little girls and boys to go out and hunt for their own fossils (safely and responsibly, of course!). And now we’re sending Fossil Hunter Lottie on a tour of the UK to meet #trowelblazing palaeontologists across the country, and find out what a day-in-the-life of a #realfossilhunter is actually like.
We’ll be photoblogging and tweeting pictures along the way, so stay-tuned. We really hope these pictures will help to show kids what real scientists look like, and that they too can grow up to be a palaeontologist.
You can join in too — share your photos of real-life fossilising, whether it’s your hobby or your job, on Twitter and Facebook, using the hashtag #RealFossilHunter. Every tweet/FaceBook post using #realfossilhunter will also be entered into a draw to win a Fossil Hunter Lottie doll (winner announced May 21st).
LET THE FOSSIL HUNTER LOTTIE #REALFOSSILHUNTER TOUR BEGIN…
Fossil Hunter Lottie’s UK tour begins, quite naturally at the Natural History Museum in London (where TeamTB’s Brenna and Tori work).
Everyone knows that there are incredible fossils on display, but stored away in the collections there are over 7 MILLION more specimens being worked on by scientists. We took Lottie behind the scenes to meet #trowelblazing NHM scientists Emma Bernard, Lorna Steel and Ria Mitchell
It’s just been Women’s History Month, and now we have International Womens’ Day. The internet is full of fabulous lists of women in science who should be better known. So here’s our trowelblazing version: 5 women who really deserve to be bigged up for their contributions to palaeontology, geology and archaeology, but were overlooked, sidelined or forgotten. Who had you heard of?
While you probably have heard of Marie Stopes, we’ll bet its for her work as a womens’ health campaigner. But before this part of her life, she was one of the leading experts in ancient plants (palaeobotany) of her age. This might not be surprising given that Marie grew up surrounded by the largest private collection of fossils and ancient stone tools in Britain, amassed by her father. She specialised in studying coal, formed by the great forests of the Carboniferous, and even travelled to Japan to work for a year in 1907.
By 1923, the year of her last scientific publications, she was already being hailed for her work on womens’ social and health rights, including contraceptive clinics which evolved into today’s Marie Stopes organisation. But in 2015 she also deserves to be remembered for her first love, palaeontology.
Marie Stopes working in the palaentology lab, about 1904. Image from Wikipedia; source. Marie Stopes International; used in accordance with upload to further knowledge of Dr Stopes.
Growing up in a village in 1920s Palestine was a young girl who went on to make one of the most important early discoveries of a Neanderthal fossil, the Tabun 1 skull. Yet despite such a find, which might have led to a stellar career in archaeology in other circumstances, today we don’t even know Yusra’s surname. She made her find in 1932 as part of local team of women workers excavating with Dorothy Garrod at her Mount Carmel dig. Excavating alongside another woman who did go onto become an archaeologist, Jacquetta Hawkes, Yusra spotted a tooth, and then most of a skull was un-earthed. Her skills as an excavator were well-respected by Garrod and Hawkes, but Yusra’s dream of studying at Oxbridge wasn’t to be, following the massive social unrest in the region. Her contribution to science, uncovered in large part by scholar Pamela Jane Smith, is gradually becoming better known, and we are grateful to the Smithsonian who recently changed their webpages to acknowledge her find.
We love Yusra’s story so much, that we have created our first live Trowelblazers performance piece, WOMAN IN TIME, EXPLORING OUR HUMANITY THROUGH POETRY AND SCIENCE, for British Science Week! It tells the story of how her, Jacquetta Hawkes and the Tabun 1 Neanderthal woman’s lives all intersected one day 80 years ago, and explores the scientific legacy that speaks to the fundamental question of what it means to be human, and a cultural legacy which stretches from the arts to activism. It’s on 18th March in Bradford, completely free, and you can book tickets here.
Not only should the name of this trowelblazer be much more widely celebrated, she should by rights also be immortalised in the history of science with one of the world’s most important fossils named after her. A teenager in 1956, Tina was keen on geology, and while checking out a quarry with deposits from before life began, was amazed to see something that looked distinctly fossil-like. However, she was fobbed off by her teachers when she tried to bring it to their attention, with the implication that she didn’t know what she was on about. In fact, her keen eyes weren’t mistaken- and just the next year, a boy called Roger Mason saw the fossil, reported it and via a family contact who was a geologist, went on to claim the credit, showing that it’s not always what you know, but who. While the fern-like fossil in question was named after him, Charnia masoni, today Tina is today still proud of her prior discovery, and still passionate about palaeontology, regularly involved with Precambrian researchers.
While Tessa is quite rightly a familiar name within archaeological circles, she is like a White Dwarf star in a binary system, eclipsed in the wider public consciousness and often also the archives by the enormous bulk of her Red Giant of a husband, Sir Mortimer Wheeler. We have yet to feature this amazing woman on TrowelBlazers (so we don’t have any photos of her with permission to use) but you can read about Lydia Carr’s biography of her and see more photos here. Tessa is a major figure in trowelblazing history, for her archaeological findings, her development of excavation best practices (including at Maiden Castle, below), and for being one of the first media-savvy figures in the field. She co-founded the Institute of Archaeology at UCL, and is a key node in the vast network of women working in archaeology in the first half of the 20th century, having trained many other trowelblazers on her excavations such as the legendary Kathleen Kenyon.
A triple-trowelblazer, Gudrun Corvinus was a pioneer in archaeology, geology AND palaeontology. She was one of the team working in Ethiopia in 1974 who found the famous early human ancestor Australopithecine skeleton, Lucy, but it was actually Gudrun who discovered the Gona deposits on the same project, which would turn out to hold the oldest known stone tools in the world, although she was barely acknowledged. She began her career, which spanned three continents and 200 million years, studying Jurassic ammonites, and then in the 1960s moved to India and made ground-breaking massive landscape surveys of the Palaeolithic archaeology there, as well as multi-disciplinary excavations. Following the Ethiopian project, she worked in Namibia on rich animal fossil deposits but then returned to Asia in the 1980s, and went on to be the first to uncover the prehistory of Nepal over 25 years more research. Her astonishing career was brutally cut short when she was killed in 2006.
The thing we’ve found since we started TrowelBlazers, is that as well as the big figures and lesser known scholars, there are many more women who have been involved with these fields from the beginning. They are present as un-named diggers, partners of professionals (often doing a lot of the work too), and anonymous figures in photographs of field trips, obviously there because they were interested in the subject. OurTrowelblazing Enigma post by Jan Freedman explores the story of one of these lost women he found during research, photographed standing in front of a geological section, quite clearly knowing what she’s about. She represents what we really think TrowelBlazers is about: discovering not only individual contributions but the way in which so many women, from the mid-19th to the 21st centuries, are connected through their shared passion for geology, palaeontology and archaeology. That’s the real take-home message- these fields have never just been about lonely, isolated female figures, but huge webs of collaboration, support and mentoring. We are proud to be part of that in our own careers.
If Tina Negus had been a boy with scholarly connections, she would now have one of the most important fossils in the world named after her. Instead, her place in the annals of palaeontology is far less well known than it deserves to be. Now a talented artist, poet and photographer, you can see how the young Tina’s gaze would drawn to something unusual about some rocks in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire, UK.
In the early summer of 1956, a teenage Tina persuaded her parents to visit this area- thanks to her existing interest in geology, sparked as a child-, keen to see for herself the Precambrian rocks there. Now for non-geology types, “Precambrian” might sound pedestrian, but for those who’ve discovered the story of Earth’s past, it has a uniquely exciting ring to it. It’s got a “Pre-” stuck on it because, up until the middle of the 20th century, when Tina was discovering geology, the succeeding Cambrian period was believed to be when animal life started. Tina, busy checking out an overgrown, little-visited quarry for sub-marine volcanic deposits, was under the same impression. However, she recounts that soon into her examination of the rock face while her family picked berries, she noticed a fossil on the surface, which looked distinctly fern-like, yet had a bizarre appearance, without a central stalk.
Mary Arizona ‘Zonia’ Baber (1862-1955) is recognized as a pioneer in geography education, and an important figure in promoting equal rights of women and minorities. She emphasized the importance of practical fieldwork and laboratory work in geography teaching, and the importance of applying geographic concepts rather than just memorizing names and places, pedagogic approaches that are still praised and encouraged today.
She earned her teaching credential in 1885 from Cook County Normal School (which later became Chicago State University. ‘Normal schools’ prepared school teachers and later became known as state teacher’s colleges). In 1887 she was recruited as a staff member at Cook County Normal and became their Head of Geography from 1889 - 1901. Following this she held a position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago (Teacher of Geology and Geography, 1901-1921). While teaching, she also began taking classes, including the first geology class that allowed women, and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1904. Multi-tasking Trowelblazer extraordinaire, she also co-founded the Geographic Society of Chicago in 1898, at the same time as teaching, running a department and earning her degree. She remained involved with the Society throughout her life, serving as its president from 1900-1904. In 1948 she received the society’s Gold Medal lifetime achievement award. Like Florence Bascom, she was listed as one of the few women in the American Men of Science.
Reproduced from open access article : Geography by Zonia Baber, published in ‘The Course of Study’ Vol. 1, No. 8 (Apr., 1901), pp. 704-706
Her efforts to promote women in geography are lessons that we can learn from today and mirror the efforts of the Trowelblazers website to highlight their important contributions. She rrecognized that women were often excluded as speakers at events due to both prejudice and lack of knowledge of their existence, and deliberately sought recommendation for female speakers for the Chicago Geographical Society from fellow Trowelblazer Harriet Chalmers Adams (first president for the Society of Women Geographers). In 1927 Baber herself became president of the SWG. Outside of geography she was also actively involved in suffrage and promoting women’s rights. Baber traveled extensively around the world from Europe to the Middle East, East Asia to the Pacific Islands and the Caribbean, both professionally attending conferences, but also related to her political work. She worked to address racism and the threat of imperialism as well as women’s issues, arguing for racial integration as a priority within then Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She was a tireless advocate for women’s suffrage, and in addition to serving on the Race Relations Committee of the Chicago Women’s Club and the Executive Committee of the Chicago Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she also served on thee Board of Mangers of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and as representative for Puerto Rico for the National Women’s Party, the Asociación Puertoriqueña de Mujeres Sufragistas, and the Liga Social Sufragistas.
Main Image: Zonia Baber gathering fossils at Mazon Creek, Illinois, 1895. The summer class in Geology, taught by Thomas C. Chamberlin, was the first field class at the University of Chicago to which women were admitted.
Image courtesy University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-00303], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago LibraryLandscape Image: Reproduced from open access article : Geography by Zonia Baber, published in 'The Course of Study’ Vol. 1, No. 8 (Apr., 1901), pp. 704-706. University of Chicago Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/992015
Today we got our hands on our very own Fossil Hunter Lottie Doll, as designed by TrowelBlazers in collaboration with Arklu!
These will be available to buy in May 2015, and we’ll be needing your help to make them a huge success, and make you shops across the world stock them.. So start spreading the word!
If you want to understand why the new Lego female scientist kits are such a big step forward, compare them to earlier Lego efforts to capture the little-girls-who-like-to-build-things demographic. The absence of princess-y pastels and pixie preciousness (not to mention boobs, as in the “rock star” Lego figure above) is awesome.
For more on how the “Research Institute” line came to be, mentalfloss has the scoop here.
5 Questions for a Scientist: Ecologist and Avian Field Biologist Allyson Jackson
“Every time I catch a bird and get to see them up close, I am reminded what an honor it is to do what I do (even though I still hate getting up before sunrise!). Now that I’m a professor, I think my favorite part is working with students and seeing them have life-changing experiences in field research, just like I did.”
Allyson is an assistant professor in environmental studies at SUNY Purchase College in New York, where she teaches courses in ecology, conservation biology, and biostatistics. She holds an undergraduate degree in biology from Juniata College in Pennsylvania, an M.S. from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and a Ph.D. from Oregon State University in Oregon. She has worked at the Tracy Aviary in Salt Lake City and as a wildlife research biologist for the Biodiversity Research Institute in Maine, researching mercury in forest songbirds.
Pioneering fossil collector Mary Anning was born on this day in 1799.
Anning lived during a time when geology as a science was just developing. She lived in Lyme Regis, England, an area where fossils lay exposed in cliff faces eroded by the sea. Anning was born to a family with little money or social standing. Despite the social norms of her time, which favored upper-class men as scholars, Anning became an acknowledged leader in fossil collection and identification. Her work helped provide a basis for the key theories upon which the science of geology is based. Called the “Princess of Paleontology” by a contemporary, she sold her fossil finds to tourists and to museums and collectors all over England.
Among her discoveries were a small Ichthyosaurus discovered in 1821 and the first Plesiosaurus, unearthed in 1823. Although Anning’s work was well-respected during her life, her gender and social standing prevented her from becoming a Fellow of the Geological Society, and many of her finds were not credited to her for the historical record.
Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, math, and all related STEM fields.
The celebration is named in honor of English mathematician Augusta Ada King (1815-1852), Countess of Lovelace, known colloquially as Ada Lovelace. Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, is sometimes considered the world’s first computer programmer for the algorithm she wrote for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, one of the world’s first mechanical computers. Over the years there have been historical disagreements over the extent of Lovelace’s knowledge of the subject and the originality of the work she published in her article, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes from the Translator,“ but Babbage himself seemed to dismiss such future claims in his memoir.
5 Questions for a Scientist: Glaciologist Kelly Brunt
Occupation: Associate Research Scientist Institution: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and University of Maryland Field:Glaciology Focus:Remote sensing of ice shelves and icebergs
Kelly is an Associate Research Scientist with the University of Maryland and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She has a bachelor’s degree in Geology from Syracuse University, a master’s degree in Geology from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of Chicago. She was a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she worked on ICESat laser altimetry data, and she is currently part of the ICESat-2 mission, which launched last Saturday, September 15, working on validation of the elevation data. On the weekends in the winter, Kelly coaches alpine ski racing at Liberty Mountain, in southern Pennsylvania.
You can follow both Kelly’s NASA and skiing activity or connect with her on Twitter (@KellyMBrunt).
1. Explain what you do in your work in one sentence (or two).
I am a glaciologist (I study ice sheets) and I am part of NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) mission. I am specifically tasked with looking at the ice sheets and validating the satellite elevation data products.
2. When did you first become interested in your field?
I have always preferred the winter. Growing up in Connecticut, my extended family liked to ski together and we often took trips to Vermont. The love of winter and snow (and the cold) led me to work in places like Montana, Alaska, and even Antarctica. Working in these places, and wanting to know more about ice, drove me to go back to school for a Ph.D. in geophysics, with an emphasis in glaciology.
Mary Golda Ross was the first Native American woman engineer. Her work at Lockheed and NASA included developing the Agena rockets, designing concepts for flights to Mars and Venus, and creating operational requirements for spacecraft.
After graduating from Northeastern State College with a math degree, she decided to put her skills to work on behalf of other Native Americans, working first as a statistician for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then at a Native American boarding school in New Mexico.
Math always called Ross’s name, and in 1942, armed with a master’s degree, she joined Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. As World War II raged, the company was working on new military aircraft. Ross helped them troubleshoot the P-38 Lightning, a fighter plane that came close to breaking the sound barrier and that engineers worried would collapse during dives. (Thanks to the work of Ross and her fellow mathematicians and engineers, Lockheed eventually realized that their fears were unfounded.)
After the war ended, Lockheed sent Ross to UCLA to earn a classification in aeronautical engineering and slowly, she began to progress through the company’s male-dominated ranks. “She worked with a lot of guys with slide rules and pocket protectors,” says Jeff Rhodes, Lockheed Martin’s historian and the editor of Code One magazine. “The stereotype was real.”
Women had always been a part of Lockheed Martin, says Rhodes. Nonetheless, when Ross was recruited to join Skunk Works, the company’s then-top-secret think tank, she was the only woman aside from the secretary.
Image Credits:
Mary G. Ross from Beyond Curie by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya
Maria Mitchell, the first professional American woman astronomer, was born on this day in 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Mitchell was also the first woman member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two years after its formation, in 1850.
Mitchell was born to Quaker parents who believed in the education of all of their ten children, regardless of gender. Mitchell received a formal education, as well as learning from her father, who was a schoolteacher, banker, and astronomer. He also helped to maintain chronometers, a timepiece sailors used to measure longitude based on time and celestial navigation, for the local whaling fleet. His daughter would assist him in doing astronomical observations and later was trusted to complete them on her own.
In 1835, at the age of 17, Mitchell founded her own elementary school, which was open to girls regardless of race. The following year, Mitchell left the school to take a job at the Nantucket Athaneum, then a private, but affordable, library. She remained at the Athaneum until 1856.
On Oct. 1, 1847, Mitchell was using a two-inch telescope on a Nantucket rooftop when she noticed a blurry object that did not appear on her star charts. This turned out to be a comet, which became known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” and later C/1847 T1. She became the third woman, after two 18th-century German astronomers—Caroline Herschel and Maria Margarethe Kirch—to discover a comet. King Frederick VI of Denmark, who had offered a prize for the discovery of new comets, awarded Mitchell a medal. She also became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences because of her discovery.
In 1865, Mitchell was the first person invited to join the faculty of the newly established Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She accepted the founder’s invitation, in part because it came with the promise of an observatory outfitted with a 12-inch telescope, then the second largest in the country. She went on to become a beloved professor, teaching more than 20 years and nurturing her students’ abilities as researchers in their own right. Her students did independent, original research and even engaged in field work with Mitchell’s professional peers during the solar eclipses of 1869 and 1878. Mitchell, who was involved in suffrage organizations and who served as the second president of the American Association of Women, also organized discussions and lectures for her students about women’s rights and politics.
DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin was born on this day in 1920.
Franklin grew up studying chemistry and physics and continued to pursue the former when she gained admission to Cambridge University over the objections of her father. She completed her undergraduate work in 1941 and her Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1945. Her work during those war years focused on the molecular structure of coal and charcoal (or, as she put it, “the holes in coal”) under the auspices of the British Coal Utilisation Research Association. She published five papers on the topic, three of them as the sole author, and helped to spawn the study of high-strength carbon fibers.
After the war, Franklin spent several years in Paris, where she continued to hone her work in crystallography (the science of atom arrangement in solid materials). She undertook the study of X-ray crystallography, which utilizes X-rays in order to study how light is diffracted when it hits a crystal. She became quite adept at this technique, and, although her work predominantly had been within physics and chemistry to this point, when she returned to England in 1951 it was to King College’s biophysics program, where she was to examine large biological cells and, in a sudden change of plans, DNA.
It was through Franklin’s X-ray crystallography work on DNA that revelations about the structure of DNA came to light. Scientists around the world were already at work unraveling the mysteries of the biological building block, but it was an image of Franklin’s, Photograph 51 as it would be dubbed, that provided the answers to several mysteries about DNA’s double helix. Maurice Wilkins, the head of the research lab, shared this photograph, without Franklin’s knowledge, with James Watson and Francis Crick, who were working at Cambridge. The clear images allowed Watson and Crick to see where their own research had gone wrong and to correct it. They published their results of the double helix structure of DNA in Nature in 1953. Although her photograph was attributed to her (and a paper she and her graduate student wrote appeared alongside their findings), modern examinations of their work suggest that Franklin’s contributions were downplayed, although whether inadvertantly or intentionally remains a debatable point.
Franklin’s bright future was not to be fully realized, however. She died in 1958 at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer. Her death rendered her ineligible to be considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize that Crick, Watson, and Wilkins would share for their DNA findings.
To close out a wonderful Women’s History Month, we would like to introduce you to Barbara McClintock, a genetic scientist, who discovered transposons. Here’s a comic of her research which she was awarded a Nobel Prize for in 1983.
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