Innovations

Mann was one of the first Black female computers for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), later NASA. At the time she was hired, the state of Virginia was segregated, as was the NACA campus at Langley, Virginia. Mann repeatedly removed the "COLORED COMPUTERS" sign segregating the cafeteria. The sign was replaced each time until Mann removed it a final time and it was never replaced. Mann also worked on John Glenn's space mission.

Working at NASA Ames Research Center, Cowings developed and patented a physiological training system called Autogenic-Feedback Training Exercise (AFTE), which enables people to learn voluntary self-control of up to 24 bodily responses in six hours. Her work was first tested in 1985, first focusing on ridding the astronaut's motion sickness. Later she trained four cosmonauts to control both motion sickness and low blood pressure after six months in space aboard the MIR space station. She found success with her biofeedback methods and continued to teach people how to control motion sickness, improve the performance of search and rescue pilots, and reduce symptoms of several patient populations experiencing nausea, dizziness and fainting.

Nash-Stevenson joined the United States Army Ballistic Missile Defense Systems Command. She holds a patent for an optical fiber holder. She joined the instrumentation group in Marshall Space Flight Center's avionics lab, where she worked for nearly ten years. She was awarded a NASA Fellowship in 1998, and eventually joined the space craft and vehicle systems group. During her career Nash-Stevenson worked on photon upconversion (UC). This is a process in which the sequential absorption of two or more photons leads to the emission of light at shorter wavelength than the excitation wavelength. An example is the conversion of infrared light to visible light. Upconversion can take place in both organic and inorganic materials, through a number of different mechanisms.

Ochoa was enticed by optical systems and committed to improving its applications for performing information processing. She wanted to help computers "see". NASA later recognized her methods in optics could be used in fabricating such as inspecting for flaws, or it might be used on a space vehicle such as the Rover. At the NASA Ames Research Center, she led a research group working primarily on optical systems for automated space exploration. At Sandia National Laboratories, she applied what she knew about optics to the research being done on nuclear weapons. She patented an optical system to detect defects in a repeating pattern and is a co-inventor on three patents for an optical inspection system, an optical object recognition method, and a method for noise removal in images.

Thomas invented the illusion transmitter , which uses two parabolic mirrors to transmit 3-D illusions of an object by use of a camera trained on the first mirror, which then sends video signals to a projector aimed at the second mirror. She developed it for the purpose of sending three-dimensional images across a distance. As of 2022, the technology is still used by NASA and is being adapted for use in surgery, as well as for televisions and video screens. Thomas also developed the digital media formats image processing systems used in the early years of NASA's Landsat program. After retiring from NASA in 1995, she has continued to mentor children for careers in STEM & works as a substitute teacher.

Cooper’s research at Drexel University College of Engineering involved thermal fluid sciences, which led to her dissertation focused on non-equilibrium plasma sterilization of spacecraft materials. She joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Planetary Protection Group at NASA in 2011. Planetary protection is the practice of protecting solar system bodies from contamination by Earth life and protecting Earth from possible life forms that may be returned from other solar system bodies.

a pioneer in the development of the theory of discontinuous automatic control (also known as "on-off" and "bang-bang" systems), which has found wide application in hysteresis control systems; such applications include guidance systems, electronics, fire-control systems, and temperature regulation; published what is now known as the "Lotz method" in 1931 for calculating the lift on a three-dimensional wing, and it became a standard technique used internationally; while at Stanford conducted research in numerical methods to solve boundary layer problems in fluid dynamics, making pioneering contributions with finite difference methods and the use of computers; published the first textbook on discontinuous automatic control in 1953; 1968, the year of her retirement, she published her second book, Discontinuous and Optimal Control; made significant advancements in methods for the prediction of aerodynamic pressures on bodies, wings and turbine blades, some of which were adopted as standard procedures throughout the world;

In 1834, Ethel H. Porter of Lincolnton received a patent for her invention related to cutting feed for horses and cattle.

held 12 patents for farm buildings

cotton breeder who breeds naturally colored varieties of cotton; inventor of FoxFibre & founder of Natural Cotton Colors Inc (1989) breeds pest-resistant plants; has created 2 naturally colored cottons & launched Foxfibre Colorganics; also has received a utility patent for the flame resistant properties she discovered and bred in Coyote and Buffalo Fox Fibre®;

Tupper started keeping bees in Iowa by 1860. Shortly before the American Civil War she started to write short articles on her first experiences in beekeeping, which were published in a local newspaper. In 1871, she and Annie Savery started the Italian Bee Company, based in Des Moines, Iowa, to import and sell Italian honey bees in the American midwest. "She attends personally to all shipments of bees, honey, extractors, hives, etc., to all her correspondence and her bees," noted a profile in 1873. She attended the North American Bee-Keepers Convention in Cleveland in 1871, and in Indianapolis in 1872, and was quoted as a national expert on apiary management the following year. Tupper was editor of The Bee-Keepers' Journal from 1873 to 1875, and taught bee-keeping at the State Agricultural College of Iowa. She also wrote for American Bee Journal, Prairie Farmer, The National Bee Journal and Youth's Companion.

In the early 1970s, Appelhof began experimenting with worms and organic waste. Her home worm container would become a new career. Her vision at the time of the Stockholm Conference for the Human Environment (1972) was "tons of worms could be eating tons of garbage." Soon she was publicly advocating using the earthworm to recycle food waste. As "Worm Woman," she introduced thousands of schoolchildren and home gardeners to vermicomposting. Her 1982 book Worms Eat My Garbage is still held as seminal reading in the field of vermicomposting.

During the years of 1984-85, Brooks traveled to Togo and Senegal in West Africa. Here she researched methods to increase productivity of the African groundnut, eventually leading to increased productivity of many different food crops in West Africa. As a member of the USAID-USDA team, she assisted in establishing collaborative relationships with research centers and universities in South Africa. She also formally represented UMES in meetings with Egyptian universities.

Salvalaio joined the Laboratory of Plant Morphogenesis at Imperial College London and started working with Arabidopsis thaliana. The main research topic of the lab is root electrotropism, a phenomenon that has been already observed in the past but was never deeply explored. Given the novelty of this research, challenges are always around the corner. A typical day in the lab would involve not only growing plants, but programming power supplies, soldering wires and 3-D printing as well, which makes this research even more exciting.

an American mycologist, and the first female plant pathologist hired by the United States Department of Agriculture.[5] She ran the US National Fungus Collections for almost thirty years, radically growing the collection and shaping its direction, and supervised or discovered numerous significant fungal diseases.[1]

Having learned that mycelium is buoyant and waterproof, Ayers decided to try using it to create a boat. With a mini-grant from the college, she got to work. She reached out to a mushroom company in nearby Grand Island for help, sharing her idea with owner Ash Gordon. He agreed to help immediately and offered her a summer internship so she could learn the ins and outs of fungi. By the end of her work there, Ayers grew a 7 foot 6 inch canoe named Myconoe out of fungi on 2019

explosives technician who conducted early testing at the Manhattan Project because she had small fingers & could easily reach inside bombs to set triggers; she and her group tested various configurations of the conventional explosives assemblies that would be used to detonate both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons & were the assembly crew for the world's first nuclear explosion, code-named Trinity, which took place at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in a desert area of south-central New Mexico on July 16, 1945;

* Cochran suggested in 1939 to use women pilots in non-combat missions * To generate publicity for the idea of women piloting military aircraft she a bomber to Great Britain * Beginnings of WASP, a civilian women pilots' organization * Members of WASP became trained pilots who tested aircraft, ferried aircraft, and trained other pilots * Purpose was to free male pilots for combat roles during World War II.

* Hill designed spectroscopic methods and developed ways to track the progress of the reactions based on solubility * These methods were used to determine the solubility of different components in non-aqueous solutions * Enabled synthetic chemists to identify, isolate, and quantify products * Applicable processes included the polymerization of ketenes, which is used in the synthesis of plastics.

Youngest (15 y.o.) African-American female accepted into an Ivy League School; youngest African-American Engineer in the US; speaks 7 languages (English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, & German); at 17 youngest IT leader to travel to Cameroon with associate Penn students with "One Laptop Per Child"

Invented clothes wringer in 1888 but never patented it & sold the rights to a white man for $18

Ceruti is the first woman to specialize in the field of high-altitude archaeology, she was team lead on the expedition which found the Children of Llullaillaco. These mummies, 1 male & 2 female Incan children, are considered the best-preserved mummies in the world. Ceruti has also studied other Inca ceremonial centers on the summits of Andean peaks above 6000 meters. She is a pioneer in the anthropological study of sacred mountains around the world, and in the emerging field of glacial archaeology. She is founder & director pro bono of the Institute of High Mountain Research. Early in her career photographs showing her co-leading an expedition above 21,000 feet were omitted from a publication because "she looked like a teenage girl" & it was believed pictures of her would make the work look easy." Ceruti is of Andean descent & believes mountaineering is in her blood.

Colter's work in the Grand Canyon National Park has become a National Historic Landmark, and she also completed striking work for the Santa Fe Railroad through her work for the Fred Harvey Company, Her work for the railroad on the La Fonda hotel, which opened in 1922, helped create the popular local Santa Fe Style. Colter considered the 1930 La Posada hotel at Winslow Station in Arizona to be her masterpiece, and it featured many characteristic elements of her distinctive style, such as red clay tile roofing, beautiful courtyards and garden spaces, and decorative ironwork. Completed 21 landmark hotels, commercial lodges & public spaces for the Fred Harvey Company. Blended Spanish Colonial Revival & Mission Revival architecture with Native American motifs & Rustic elements that became popular troughout the Southwest. Her work is credited with inspiring the Pueblo Deco style. her work influenced the look & feel of an entire generation of parkitecture often called National Park Service rustic & set the precedent for using on-site materials & bold, large-scale design elements. 1936 created Mimbreno china & flatware for use on the Super Chief rail service on the Santa Fe Railroad.

Ítala Fulvia Villa oversaw the building of the colossal Sixth Pantheon, a subterranean mausoleum known as the Sixth Pantheon or the Great Pantheon. It is a gigantic underground necropolis with 40,000 plots in the Chacarita Cemetery, an experiment that was constructed between 1950-1958. Villa received no credit for it until 2016.

After obtaining her degree from the School of Architecture of the University of Buenos Aires Villa became involved with the founding of the Grupo Austral in 1938. This group of architects were particularly noted for bringing the modernist movement to Argentina. They were the first group to recognize that the urbanist movement must holistically look at the needs of the city and its culture, rather than randomly building individual structures. They advocated for green space, parks and streets to be designed for meeting the needs of growth and attempted to bring scientific analysis into city planning. While they viewed cultural development as a key component of architectural identity, they did not believe in preserving historic structures for the sake of history but rather whether analysis proved a structure had adaptability to future societal growth and functionality.

led her community protest against off-shore drilling at fort Bragg CA; works in recycled materials & paint to depict environmental issues;

2021 opened Friedli Gallery in St. Paul MN-a gallery to promote indigenous artists; member of worlds only indigenous female snow sculpting team

is widely known for her fully beaded tennis shoes, which feature pictorial elements on solid, lane-stitched backgrounds; is a regular contributing writer to First American Art Magazine; was a co-curator of Hearts of Our People, a groundbreaking national traveling exhibition of Native American women’s art that opened in 2019; uses her beadwork to tell stories;

one of the originators of the term post-blackness; organized numerous innovative exhibitions of art by African-Americans & mentored the careers of numerous African-American artists; spearheaded the construction of the first-ever purpose-built facility in the Studio Museum’s history; helped produce the revolutionary 1993 Biennial and curated the groundbreaking exhibit Black Male, which examined destructive and persistent stereotypes about African-American masculinity;

Reportedly received a patent for making lubricated molds to preserve her butter sculptures but no patent was located; preferred sculpting in butter even after she learned how to use marble; 1st American butter sculptess

Theresa Secord (b.1958) is a traditional Penobscot basket maker and the founding director of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance (MIBA). Theresa received the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2016. In 2009, she was honored with the First Peoples Fund Community Spirit Award and in 2003, the Prize for Creativity in Rural Life by the Women’s World Summit Foundation, presented at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland; for helping basket makers rise out of poverty. Theresa learned to weave ash and sweet baskets on Indian Island from her mentor, the late Madeline Tomer Shay (Penobscot) beginning in 1988. She weaves family and tribal styles on antique wooden forms, using tools handed down to her from her great-grandmother, Philomene Saulis Nelson. Theresa has taught more than a dozen apprentices to weave baskets and her own work resides in museum and private collections across the nation. She is currently mentoring her own son again, Caleb Hoffman.

Titre-Montgomery is Co-Founder of Cornerstone Interactive Studios, a new studio focused on reimaging cinematic and interactive experiences. She graduated with a degree in computer animation from Miami International University of Art and Design in 2000 and has worked on computer animation for games since graduation.

pioneer of modern contemporary dance; is known as the Mother of Modern Dance; her innovative technique emphasized natural movement in contrast to the rigidity of traditional ballet; emphasized what she called "evolutionary" dance motion, insisting that each movement was born from the one that preceded it, that each movement gave rise to the next, and so on in organic succession; opened several school to teach her philosophy of dance; her autobiography "My Life" was published in 1927

Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology. Taking inspiration from African-based dance where one part of the body plays against one another, she focused on articulating the torso in her choreography; this became known as the Dunham Technique. At the height of her career in the 1940s and 1950s, Dunham was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America and was widely popular in the United States. The Washington Post called her "dancer Katherine the Great." For almost 30 years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only self-supported American black dance troupe at that time. Over her long career, she choreographed more than ninety individual dances. She was a pioneer of Dance Anthropology, established methodologies of ethnochoreology, and her work gives essential historical context to current conversations and practices of decolonization within and outside of the discipline of anthropology. As part of her Masters thesis did ethnographic studies of dance in Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique & Trinidad. Developed the Dunham Technique of Dance.

Primus' sojourn to West Africa has proven invaluable to students of African dance. She learned more about African dance, its function and meaning than had any other American before her. Primus was known as a griot, the voice of cultures in which dance is embedded. She was able to codify the technical details of many of the African dances through the notation system she evolved and was also able to view and to salvage some "still existent gems of dances before they faded into general decadence."[22] She has been unselfish in sharing the knowledge she has gained with others.[1] The significance of Primus' African research and choreography lies in her presentation of a dance history which embraces ethnic unity, the establishment of an articulate foundation for influencing future practitioners of African dance, the presentation of African dance forms into a disciplined expression, and the enrichment of American theater through the performance of African dance

Remark Glass was founded in 2016 by Danielle Ruttenberg, Rebecca Davies, and Mark Ellis. It is a zero-waste certified, woman owned business that creates hand-blown glassware and lighting from recycled bottles. They collect glass from local restaurants and community members in Philadelphia, and transform them into unique and sustainable products. They also have a sister non-profit organization called Bottle Underground (founded 2020), which aims to solve the larger waste issue of glass. They have been featured on Good Morning America, Forbes, and The I on MSN.com. “Alongside our sister non-profit Bottle Underground, every glass purchased is a bottle diverted from the landfill.” They have created a keepsake line that transforms a glass keepsake (usually a bottle) from a special occasion into a home accessory like a bowl, pitcher or lamp

Driscoll's artistic potential was apparent and she was hired by Louis Comfort Tiffany to work at Tiffany Glass Company (later known as Tiffany Studios) in 1888.[7] She worked there off and on for more than 20 years, designing lamps and fancy goods as well as supervising the Women's Glass Cutting Department.[7] Engaged or married women were not allowed to work at the company, so Driscoll had to leave because of her marriage in 1889. After Driscoll's first husband Francis Driscoll died in 1892, she resumed working for Tiffany. She became engaged again in 1896-1897, to Edwin Waldo, but he disappeared and no marriage occurred. She remained at Tiffany Studios until her marriage to Edward A. Booth in 1909.[6] While employed with Tiffany, Driscoll worked closely with a number of other "Tiffany Girls" including Alice Carmen Gouvy and Lillian Palmié.[6]

Though her name may be unknown to many, Waugh’s work is embedded in the early history of the National Park Service, which has managed and maintained America’s public lands and monuments since 1916. From 1933 to 1937, Waugh worked as a landscape architect and artist in the Branch of Planning for the park service, at first developing and designing technical manuals for the but eventually turning to the creation of posters promoting state and national parks that would become her hallmark.

A major compositional success for Beach came with her Mass in E-flat major, which was performed in 1892 by the Handel and Haydn Society orchestra, which since its foundation in 1815 had never performed a piece composed by a woman. Newspaper music critics responded to the Mass by declaring her one of America's foremost composers, comparing the piece to Masses by Cherubini and Bach. Beach followed this up with an important milestone in music history: her Gaelic Symphony, the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. It premiered October 30, 1896, performed by the Boston Symphony "with exceptional success," although "whatever the merits or defects of the symphony were thought to be, critics went to extraordinary lengths in their attempts to relate them to the composer's sex.”