Vilma Espín was a Cuban revolutionary, feminist, and chemical engineer. She was known as “Cuba’s First Lady” and was the most politically powerful woman in the country. Espín was born in 1930 in Santiago, Cuba to Margarita Guillois and Jose Espín, the chief accountant and executive assistant to the CEO of the Bacardi rum company. …
Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-British architect who became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize and the first woman to be awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in her own right. Hadid was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland before continuing her education at the American …
Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian particle physicist and the first woman to hold the position of Director-General of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). Gianotti was born in 1960 in Rome, Italy. From a young age, she showed remarkable powers of concentration and developed talents in cooking, music and art at home, and Greek, …
Jane Elliott is an American former third-grade schoolteacher, anti-racism, feminist and LGBT activist and educator. She is best known for her “Blue eyes-Brown eyes” exercise initially devised to teach third graders about racial prejudice. Elliott was born in 1933 in Riceville, Iowa on her family’s farm. She attended a one-room rural schoolhouse before continuing her …
Dorothy Hodgkin OM FRS was a British biochemist who developed protein crystallography. She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for her determination of the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12. She is one of the pioneering scientists who worked in the field of X-ray crystallography studies of biomolecules. Hodgkin was born in 1910 in …
Mae Jemison is an American physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first African American woman to travel in space in 1992, when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Jemison was born in 1956 in Decatur, Alabama. At the age of three, Jemison’s family moved to Chicago so that she and her …
Dr. Justina Ford was an American physician who become the first female African American physician licensed to practice in Denver, Colorado, challenging and overcoming gender and racial barriers to succeed in her medical career. She practiced gynaecology, obstetrics, and paediatrics from her home for half a century. Ford was born in 1871 in Knoxville, Illinois. …
Stephanie Kwolek was an American chemist who is best known for inventing the first of a family of synthetic fibers of exceptional strength and stiffness: poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide—better known as Kevlar. Kwolek was born in 1923 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Her father, John Kwolek, was a naturalist and Kwolek spent hours exploring the woods and fields …
Dr Helen Sharman OBE FRSC, is a British chemist who became the first Briton in space and the first woman to visit the Mir space station in 1991. Sharman was born in 1963 in Grenoside, Sheffield. Her father, a physicist, inspired an early interest in science and made her realise how relevant science is to …
Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She is best known for her role as an Award-winning American NASA scientist and mathematician who, as the Director of the Software Engineering Division at Charles Stark Draper Laboratory (CSDL), worked to develop the Apollo program. Hamilton was born in 1936 in Paoli, Indiana. …