Women
Maria del Socorro Flores Gonzalez
⚕️ Medicine
Born: 1955
Country: Mexico
Education: Autonomous University of Coahuila BS Chemistry 1976; National School of biological Sciences of the National Polytechnic Institute MS & PhD both in Imunology
Olga D. Gonzalez-Sanabria
⚛️ Chemical Engineering
- began her career at NASA in 1979 and retired in December 2011 with 32 years of NASA service
- was the highest ranking Hispanic at NASA Glen research Center in Ohio
- was featured together with her husband, Rafael Sanabria, as "NASA Glenn's Dynamic Duo" in HENAAC's Technical magazine's (Winter 2004 edition) cover story
- has authored/co-authored over 30 technical reports and presentations for journals and conferences
- her contributions resulted in improved separators that isolate oxidation and reduce voltage loss, extending fuel cell battery life and space travel capabilities
Born: Unknown
Country: Puerto Rico
Education: University of Puerto Rico @ Mayaguez BS Chemical Engineering 1978; University of toledo MS Chemical engineering 1985
Mary Lowe Good
🔬 Inorganic Chemistry
- served as the Under Secretary for Technology in the United States Department of Commerce from 1993 to 1997 under President Bill Clinton
- briefly served as Acting United States Secretary of Commerce from April 3, 1996, to April 12, 1996
- no chemistry course or lab was offered at her high school, so she would spend her time as a young student creating her own labs
- once produced a homemade photography studio in the cellar of her home after fixing up an old enlarger and reading up on the chemicals needed for photo developing
- initially attended Arkansas State Teacher's College (now the University of Central Arkansas) with the intention of being a home economics teacher
- received her first Q-level government clearance at age 19
- her graduate work involved studying radioactive iodine in aqueous solutions (used for treating thyroid conditions)
- spent 25 years in teaching and research at Louisiana State University and the University of New Orleans
- was the first woman to be elected to the board of the American Chemical Society in 1972
- was the first woman to be elected a division head of IUPAC
- 1989 was instrumental in introducing the "Chemistry in Action" program, encouraging IUPAC members to become active and visible leaders in areas of scientific and social importance, including the atmosphere and the environment, energy processes, advanced materials, and bio-technology
- 1980 was approached to become head of the Engineered Materials Research division at Signal Research Center, Inc. (previously Universal Oil Products, later Allied-Signal Inc.)
- 1981 was chosen as vice-president and director of research at Allied Signal
- became president and director of research for Signal Research Center in 1985, and president of Allied-Signal Engineered Materials Research in 1986
- held government positions under the administrations of four presidents: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton
- 1988 to 1991 was the first woman to chair the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation
- while Undersecretary led the Clean Car Initiative to develop a hybrid gas-electric car
- was the founding dean of the George W. Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology (EIT) at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock
- 1988 to 1993 was president of Zonta International Foundation, an organization supporting the involvement of women in business and science, and the improvement internationally of their legal, political, economic, educational and health status
- delivered the very first Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture in 1990 at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, now the Science History Institute, giving a talk titled “Chemically Based Technology for 2010”
- described her mother as the smartest person she ever knew
- was the oldest of 4 siblings
- as a child enjoyed accompanying her father on fishing and hunting outings
- privately funded college tuitions for local students who were talented but lacked resources, providing an educational launchpad for many
- encouraged debate, but when she stood up and paced the room with her hands in her pockets, the debate was over
- donated her papers to the UA Little Rock Center for History and Culture
- held 4 patents
Born: 1931
Country: USA
Education: University of Central Arkansas BS Chemistry 1950; University of Arkansas MS Inorganic Chemistry 1953 & PhD Radiochemistry 1955
Dame Jane Morris Goodall
🔍 primatologist
🔍 zoologist
🔍 ethologist
🔍 anthropologist
- born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall & formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall
- first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960
- as a child her father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee she named Jubillee as an alternative to a teddy bear & it sparked her interest in primates-it still sits on her dresser
- began working with Louis Leakey in 1957 & he sent her to study primates in London 1958
- was the eighth person to be allowed to study for a PhD at Cambridge without first having obtained a bachelor's degree
- set herself apart from convention by naming the animals in her studies of primates instead of assigning each a number
- is the only human ever accepted into chimpanzee society & was the lowest-ranking member of a troop for a period of 22 months
- as of 2004 was travelling nearly 300 days a year
- is the former president of Advocates for Animals
- is a vegetarian
- is an outspoken environmental advocate, speaking on the effects of climate change on endangered species such as chimpanzees
- is a critic of fox hunting
- as a young woman took night classes in Theosophy
- has stated that dogs are her favorite animal
- has prosopagnosia, which makes it difficult to recognize familiar faces
- 1988 when cartoonist Gary Larson visited Goodall's research facility in Tanzania he was attacked by a chimpanzee named Frodo, the same chimpanzee who exiled Goodall from his troop when he became alpha
- 2022 The Lego Group issued set number 40530, A Jane Goodall Tribute, depicting a Jane Goodall minifigure and three chimpanzees in an African forest scene
- Stevie Nicks' song "Jane", written in 1990, celebrates Goodall's life and work
- is honoured by The Walt Disney Company with a plaque on the Tree of Life at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park, alongside a carving of her beloved David Greybeard, the original chimpanzee that approached Goodall during her first year at Gombe
- has written 28 books with 12 of them for children; is the subject of over 40 movies
- mostly went barefoot when conducting her research
- her mother, Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, wrote novels under the name Vanne Morris Goodall
- in Africa she spent 2 years visiting a troop of chimpanzees & observing them, imitating them, eating their food & spending time in the trees with them before they would come within 30 feet of her
- the general public was introduced to her life work via "Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees" a documentary first broadcast on American television on December 22, 1965 it was filmed by her first husband and narrated by Orson Welles
- held a visiting professorship in psychiatry at Stanford University from 1970 to 1975, and in 1973, was appointed to her longtime position of honorary visiting professor of zoology at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania
- 1960 Tanzanian officials would not allow her to go to the Gombe Stream Game Reserve on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika without an escort so she took her mother & a cook named Dominic
- was at odds with her colleagues because she named the chimpanzees rather than just assigning them numbers
- celebrated paleoanthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey was her mentor, hired her as his personal secretary at the local natural history museum & subsequently got her into Oxford for her PhD
- Leakey saw her lack of formal training as an advantage in studying chimpanzees, as she would presumably be more open-minded and less bound to traditional scientific wisdom about primate behavior
- credits her observations of chimpanzees with making her a better mother, and with being a mother for helping her better understand chimpanzees
- her only child-a son named Hugo-was nicknamed Grub & as a small child was kept in a "caged lanai" to protect him while he accompanied his mother during her chimpanzee observations
- Dian Fossey spent a brief time with Goodall to study her methods
- her father, Mortimer Morris-Goodall, was a well-known race car driver.
- she documented a four-year war between two bands of chimps, marked by extreme savagery and acts of cannibalism
Born: 1934
Country: UK
Education: Darwin College, Cambridge PhD Ethology 1965; Queens Secretarial School 1954
Sarah Elisabeth Goode
💡 Inventor
💼 Entrepreneur
- 14) Sarah Elisabeth Goode
- 1884, invented a folding cabinet bed to fit in small homes
- Was born into slavery & freed after the Civil War
- Moved to Chicago & opened a furniture store for working-class customers
- 2012, Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy was opened in South Chicago
- Held 1 patent
Born: 1855
Country: USA
Education: no formal education
Laura Gott
- no info about her was located & it is unknown where the information about her invention was originally found-it was probable in an article about another woman
Bette Nesmith Graham
💡 Inventor
🔍 secretary
- Mother of musician & producer Michael Nesmith of The Monkees
- Invented white-out in 1956 while working as a typist; sold Liquid Paper Company to Gillette in 1979 for $47.5 million plus royalties
- Dropped out of high school to attend secretarial school
- Her invention was originally called Mistake Out & was made in her North Dallas kitchen; son Michael & his friends helped fill the orders
- Established 2 foundations to empower striving women in the arts & business
- Provided a green belt with a fish pond, an employee library & a childcare center at her new company headquarters in 1975
Born: 1924
Country: USA
Education: HS dropout
![Photo of Katharine "Kay" Meyer Graham](/women_pictures/Graham_Katharine "Kay" Meyer.png)
Katharine "Kay" Meyer Graham
🔍 Publishing
- her memoir, Personal History (1997), won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998
- attended a Montessori school until the fourth grade
- began working for the Post in 1938
- her husband committed suicide in 1963 & she assumed his position as head of the Washington Post
- January 30, 1998, television station WCPX-TV in Orlando changed its callsign to WKMG-TV in her honor
- grew up in a wealthy household, with many luxuries, but was not close to her parents
- her leadership at the Washington Post helped to enhance the paper's reputation and boost circulation
- 1971 turned The Post into a public corporation
- survived a 1974 strike at The Post by union pressmen
- lacked confidence and distrusted her own knowledge to lead The Post while admitting she made numerous mistakes
- was a strong supported of the Send-A-Kid-To-Camp program
- described herself as "socially awkward," "painfully shy," and "just a doormat housewife"
- didn't like it when people called her the most powerful woman in America
- at the time of her death was working on a book about the history of Washington
- worked to achieve a more diversified newsroom by hiring more women and blacks
- confronted biases against women that regularly appeared in print
- parents travelled a lot & she & her siblings were raised by nannies, governesses and private tutors
- neither of her parents attended her college graduation in 1938 but she received a congratulatory telegram from her mother's secretary which misspelled her first name
- “Becoming Katherine Graham,” a documentary is available on Netflix
- her mother told her: 'Nobody's interested in listening to you.'
- was sometimes called the Iron Lady
Born: 1917
Country: USA
Education: Vassar College 1934-36 the transferred to University of Chicago BA History 1938
Mary Temple Grandin
🔍 academic
💡 inventor
🔍 and ethologist
- is a prominent proponent of the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter
- is the author of more than 400 scientific papers on animal behavior
- one of the first autistic people to document the insights she gained from her personal experiences with autism
- is a faculty member with Animal Sciences in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Colorado State University
- was diagnosed with "brain damage" at age 2 & autistic savant as an adult
- when she was a toddler doctors recommended she be institutionalized & her father was agreeable but her mother wasn't & tried speech therapy instead
- she has described her years in junior high & high school as the worst time of her life
- was expelled at the age of 14 for throwing a book at a schoolmate who taunted her
- advocates for early intervention to address autism and supportive teachers, who can direct fixations of the child with autism in fruitful directions
- has been the subject of many books, articles, movies, & documentaries
- did not talk until she was three and a half years old
- was mainstreamed into a normal kindergarten at age five
- advocates for the acceptance of neurodiversity, challenging the notion of seeking a comprehensive cure
- her book, "Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior," explores the parallels between the thoughts of animals and the experience of autism, shedding light on how sensory processing differences can provide insight into animal behavior
- her book, "Animals Make Us Human," delves deeper into animal welfare, emphasizing the importance of understanding animals’ emotional needs
- her memoir is titled "Thinking in Pictures,"
- in school was given the nickname “tape recorder” due to her habit of repeating words repeatedly
- holds 1 patent under the name Temple Grandin
Born: 1947
Country: USA
Education: Franklin Pierce University BA Human Psychology !970; AS MS Animal Science 1975; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign PhD Animal Science 1989
Evelyn Boyd Granville
📊 Mathematics
💻 Computer Science
- none
Born: 1924
Country: USA
Education: Smith College BA Mathematics & Physics 1945; Yale University PhD Mathematics 1949
Hadiyah-Nicole Green
⚛️ medical physicist
- one of 66 black women to earn a Ph.D. in physics in the United States between 1973 and 2012
- is the second black woman and the fourth black person ever to earn a doctoral degree in physics from The University of Alabama at Birmingham
- orphaned at a young age and raised by her aunt and uncle in St. Louis, Missouri
- 1st in her family to go to college
- strong advocate for Historically Black Colleges and Universities
- the deaths of her aunt & uncle who raised her from cancer led to her interest in developing new cancer treatments
- dedicates much of her spare time to speaking to and mentoring young black students
- served as Miss Alabama A&M University 2002-2003
- is currently an assistant professor at Morehouse School of Medicine in the Department of Surgery and the recipient of $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
- holds 1 patent with 6 pending
- elected class president both in middle and high school
Born: 1981
Country: USA
Education: Alabama A & M University BS Physics & Optics 2003; University of Alabama at Birmingham MS 2009 & PhD 2012 both in Physics
Nancy Green
🔍 Advertising figure
- was born a slave
- had 2 or 4 children (records are unclear)
- has been variously described as a servant, nurse, nanny, housekeeper, an cook for Samuel Johnson Walker and his wife Amanda & helped raised their children-1 son was a district judge & another was a doctor
- by the end of the Civil War she had lost her husband & all her children
- age fifty-nine, Green made her debut as Aunt Jemima at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago, beside the "world's largest flour barrel" (twenty-four feet high), where she operated a pancake-cooking display, sang songs, and promoted the product; refused to sign a "lifetime contract" to portray Aunt Jemima & only held the position for 20 years
- refused to cross the ocean to attend the 1900 Paris exhibition & was replaced
- the controversy over who perfected the pancake recipe, Green or chefs at Quaker Oats or Chris Rutt & Charles Underwood (Rutt & Underwood founded the Pearl Milling Company, the new name for Aunt Jemima, in 1889) continues
- according to the 1910 census, she was still employed as a residential housekeeper at age 76
- was an advocate against poverty and in favor of equal rights for the black population
- was buried in a pauper's grave & it's location was unknown until 2015 when a campaign was started to erect a headstone & give her the recognition she deserved; when Quaker Oats was approached for a contribution "Their corporate response was that Nancy Green and Aunt Jemima aren't the same – that Aunt Jemima is a fictitious character" [Wikipedia]
- a headstone was erected in 2020 & paid for with private donations
- 2020 PepsiCo the parent company of Quaker Oats announced they were discontinuing the Aunt Jemima brand because it was considered racist
- rumor had it she died a millionaire as a result of being Aunt Jemima but the truth is she was paid a paltry sum & continued to work as a domestic until a few years prior to her death
- the stories she told of her life as a slave during her publicity appearances were a combination of her real life & stories written by a white, southern representative of the Quaker Oats company
- her last name has also been reported as Hughes or Hayes, with the later being the name of her husband
Born: 1834
Country: USA
Education: Unknown
Bettye Washington Greene
🔬 Physical Chemistry
- 1st African-American female PhD chemist to work in a professional position at Dow Chemical Company
- Attended segregated public schools
- Was an expert in latex materials & polymers
- Before joining Dow she taught undergraduate chemistry
- Worked at Dow for 25 years
- Was a charter member of Midland, Michigan Alumni Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta
- Held 3 patents
Born: 1935
Country: USA
Education: Tuskegee Institute BS Chemistry 1955; Wayne State University PhD Physical Chemistry 1965
Teri Greeves
🔍 Textiles - Traditional Beadwork
- was already an accomplished beadwork artist at the age of eight
- learned how to use the lane technique of attaching beads to hides from her aunt
- uses a loom to bead bracelets
- strives to portray Kiowa realities and oral history, her own life experiences, and pop imagery
- her work is found in such public collections as British Museum, Heard Museum, Montclair Art Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, the Hampton University Museum, the Heard Museum, the Joselyn Museum, the School of American Research, the National Museum of the American Indian, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Sequoyah National Research Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture
- originally wanted to be an attorney & work on Native American issues
Born: 1970
Country: USA
Education: St. John's College 1988; Cabrillo College 1993; University of California-Santa Cruz BA American Studies 1995
![Photo of Kathryn "K-K" Gregory](/women_pictures/Gregory_Kathryn "K-K".png)
Kathryn "K-K" Gregory
💡 Inventor
🔍 Textiles
- became an inventor-entrepreneur in 1994, at the age of 10
- 1997 became the youngest person ever to promote a product on QVC, where just a 6-minute spot earned her $22,000 in sales
- signed purchase and marketing agreements with the Girl Scouts, Federal Express, and McDonald’s, among others
- other interests include rock climbing
- after college moved to California & worked as a videographer including a stint on Extreme Makeover
- left Writies to her mother to run in order to attend college & travel, returning to help run it in 2010
- holds3 patents
Born: 1984
Country: USA
Education: Southern New Hampshire University BA Humanities
Carolyn Widney Greider
🔬 Molecular Biology
- Her mother died when she was 7; her father gave her a great deal of room to develop a sense of independence
- Was dyslexic & had a difficult time in school
- Was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Elizabeth Blackburn & Jack Szostak for the discovery & work with telomerase, the enzyme that makes telomere DNA, is the key to the aging process & the growth of cancer cells
- Applied to 13 graduate schools & was accepted by only 2 due to her low GRE scores she attributed to her dyslexia Holds 3 patents
Born: 1961
Country: USA
Education: UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies BA Biology 1983; UC Berkeley PhD Molecular Biology 1987
Irene Greif
💻 Computer Science
- first woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; was a professor of computer science at the University of Washington before returning to MIT as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science (1977–87)
- Preferred research over teaching
- left academia in 1987 to join Lotus, where she directed its Product Design Group,[9] and created the Lotus Research group in 1992
- Lotus was acquired by IBM & she became an IBM Fellow and served as director of collaborative user experience in the company's Thomas J. Watson Research Center
- retired from IBM in 2013
- is featured in the Notable Women in Computing cards
- brought a more people-centric approach to software design
- CSCW married sociology, anthropology and computer science, focusing on learning how people actually work with computers, rather than how they say they work
- the fourth woman to hold the distinction of being an IBM Lotus Fellow
- in her free time likes painting, knitting, cooking and travel
- in her dissertation, she published the first operational actor model which in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats "actors" as the universal primitives of concurrent digital computation: in response to a message that it receives, an actor can make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and determine how to respond to the next message received
- brings her knitting to meetings, makes handbags, hats, and sweaters
- holds 1 patent
Born: Unknown
Country: USA
Education: MIT SB Mathematics 1969, SM 1972 & PhD 1975 both in Computer Science & Electrical Engineering
Helen Greiner
🔍 Robotics
💻 Computer Science
- moved to the United States when she was 5
- her long term goal is to understand the nature of intelligence
- became interested in robotics after seeing "Star Wars" when she was 10
- is an avid gardener
- the Tertill robots not only pull weeds but can prevent new weeds from growing
- she has tried everything from wakeboarding to kiteboarding to kayaking, & is always looking for new adventures
- her PackBots were used in the rescue effort after the September 11 attacks and for search and bomb-disposal in Iraq and Afghanistan
- known as the Robot Queen
- while working at NASA, helped in designing robots to do repair work in space
- helped design a robot named Scooba that can wash the floor
- played chess with her father at five
- by middle school she was hacking the family computer in order to control her brother's radio-operated cars
- it took twelve years to sell an iRobot at a profit
- had to overcome her fear of public speaking and flying and stop being an introvert when she became the public "face" of iRobot
- is a big snowboarding fan
- believes robots will eventually be in every home, doing tasks like walking children to school or cleaning homes
- her company's mission statement has always been, “Build cool stuff, deliver great product, make money, have fun, and change the world,”
- holds 6 patents
Born: 1967
Country: UK
Education: MIT BS Mechanical Engineering 1989 & MS Computer Science 1990
Eliza Ann Grier
🔍 Obstetrics and Gynecology
- none
Born: 1864
Country: USA
Education: Fisk University 1891; Women s Medical College of Pennsylvania 1897 MD
Dana A. Griffin
🔍 Community Outreach
🤖 Age Tech entrepreneur and AI for Good advocate
- raised by her grandparents in Transylvania, Romania until she was 8 & her grandmother died so she went to live with her parents for the 1st time
- moved to the US to attend University
- Eldera stands for "The Era of The Elders"
- to ensure safety, every mentor undergoes a rigorous vetting process including criminal background checks and identity verification
- serves as the NY director of AI Commons and an official UN delegate to Global Pulse
- spends her time cooking, training in Krav Maga and exploring human wisdom
- Eldera's logo is a stylized Fibonacci sequence
- holds 8 patents under the name D.A Griffin
- her grandfather taught her Romanian and introduced her to the Greek legends while her grandmother spoke to her in Hungarian and educated her about the fictional worlds of Hans Christian Andersen and the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales
Born: Unknown
Country: Romania
Education: University of Akron 2 BS Business Administration, International business & Sales Management 2001 & 2005
Margaret Elizabeth Grigsby
⚛️ Physician
- none
Born: 1923
Country: USA
Education: Prairie View College BA 1943; University of Michigan MD 1947; diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Catherine Allsop Griswold
🔍 Fashion
🔍 Textiles
- held 31 apparel-related patents but only 17 were located
- one of her most notable innovations was a corset that had skirt-supporting ribbons, which helped distribute the weight of heavier skirts over the entirety of a woman’s body and allowed for women to be less fatigued and have a greater range of movement
- 1 of her corsets from 1876 is held by Metropolitan Museum of Art
- played a role in the Dress Reform Movement of 1876
- when a resident in New York, the Worcester Corset Company manufactured her designs
- little is known about her with the exception being her patents
- her first name is also listed as Cathrine or Catharine or C.A. on her patents
Born: Unknown
Country: USA
Education: Unknown
Emily Gross
💡 Inventor
- with the exception of 1 Facebook entry, no information was discovered about this woman
Born: Unknown
Country: USA
Education: Unknown
Maria Reiche Grosse-Neumann
📊 Mathmatics
🔍 Archaeology
- Dedicated over 50 years to studying & preserving the Nazca Lines
- Originally moved to Peru to tutor the German Consul's children
- Discovered the Nazca Lines were 28 different kinds of animals & birds
- Hypothesized the Lines were a large-scale celestial calendar
- Known as "The Lady of the Lines"
- Moved closed to the Lines to protect & preserve them; ;obbied for them & gained national & international attention for them; due to her efforts they were designated a UNESCO Heritage Site in 1994
- 1934 in Cusco, Peru, she accidentally stabbed herself with a cactus & lost a finger to gangrene
- Collaborated with American historian, Paul Kosok, who 1st showed her the Lines in 1941
- Wrote "The Mystery of the Desert" in 1949; used the proceeds from the book to fund her efforts & hire guards to protect the Lines
- At age 90, wrote & published "Contributions to Geometry & Astronomy in ancient Peru"
Born: 1903
Country: Germany
Education: Dresden University of Technology
Christiane Guguen-Guillouzo
🔍 Liver
🔍 bile
- holds 5 patents
Born: Unknown
Country: France
Education: Unknown
Vinaya Gunasekar
🔍 Robotics
- helped start the science wing at her elementary school through her initiative, Project R.O.O.T in 5th grade
- is an environmental activist and STEM changemaker who is passionate about recycling and using technology and robotics to benefit our Earth in innovative ways
- member of all-girls FIRST Robotics Team Infinity & Beyond and is an ambassador of The STEAM Connection
- is interested in pursuing a career in economic consulting
- in 6th grade wrote a book about the environment
Born: 2008 or 2009
Country: USA
Education: currently a student at Indiana University of Bloomington Kelly School of Business
![Photo of Kathryn "Kitty Lou" nee Carter Hach-Darrow](/women_pictures/Hach-Darrow_Kathryn "Kitty Lou" nee Carter.png)
Kathryn "Kitty Lou" nee Carter Hach-Darrow
🔍 Water purification
🔬 Chemistry
💼 Businesswoman
🔍 Philanthropist
Kathryn "Kitty Lou" nee Carter Hach-Darrow
🔍 Water purification
🔬 Chemistry
💼 Businesswoman
🔍 Philanthropist
- flew her own plane to small airfields across the country to sell water purification kits
- was the first woman director of the American Water Works Association
- age 5 had her 1st ride in a plane (her father's) & loved flying ever since
- earned money for freshman college tuition by raising and selling turkeys
- accumulated over 7,000 hours flying time & was rated for multi-engine and instrument flying
- at the age of 65 she acquired her license to pilot a jet
- under her leadership Hach Chemical was instrumental in standardizing water-purification tests and pioneered many world-standard analytical instruments & their tests were designed to be simple and effective, with nontechnical directions that made their products easy for both chemists and non-chemists to use
- as of 2012, about 70 percent of municipalities in the United States used Hach Company instrumentation
- 1999, she and her son Bruce sold the Hach company to Danaher Corporation
- she & the Hach family were significant contributors to the building of Hach Hall, a new chemistry building dedicated at Iowa State University on October 8, 2010
- due to the Great Depression her father had to sell his beloved plane & leave his car dealership & moved the family to a farm where they struggle to survive
- her husband Clifford oversaw the company’s research and development while she dealt with business operations, marketing, and other general management
- she pioneered a direct-mail campaign that radically expanded the company
- was the first woman to serve on the board at Loveland’s First National Bank
- 1966 when the company reached 0ne million in revenue she celebrated by treating the entire company to her famous pecan pie, a tradition that accompanied subsequent celebrations
- Clifford died in 1990 & she assumed the job of CEO, growing the company to become the largest woman-operated business in the state of Colorado, with annual sales in excess of $100 million
- ss a young girl would crawl into her father’s airplane, outfitted in helmet and goggles, to sleep in the cockpit
- 1999 sold the Hach Chemical Company to science and technology company Danaher
- employed three full-time teachers to offer 42 unique courses on subjects ranging from basic writing skills to algebra to her employees resulting in fewer production errors in the following weeks, and employee retention increased steadily
Born: 1922
Country: USA
Education: Christian Female College (now Columbia College) transferred to Iowa State University Food Science major 1944 (no degree located, probably dropped out to raise her family after marrying 1943 when a sophmore)
Sharon Hagle
🔭 astronaut
💼 entrepreneur
- 2022 with husband Marc became the 1st married couple to go into space on a commercial flight on Blue Origin’s 20th flight of its New Shepard rocket
- November 22, 2024 she & her husband became the only married couple to travel to space twice, where they conducted scientific experiments in microgravity, wore BioButtons to monitor their vital signs during launch and tying ropes to secure payloads pallets in orbit
- had a decades long career in commercial real estate as a site selector for national retail tenants in the southeastern United States
- since 2007 has been a registered Virgin Galactic Future Astronaut
- 2000 to 2020 sponsored the Himalayan Youth Foundation in Kathmandu, Nepal, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting education and care for underprivileged and orphaned children
- completed Zero Gravity training at Kennedy Space Center, NASA training at (NASTAR) and the Russian Cosmonaut Space Training at Star City, Russia
- SpaceKids' motto is “Bringing the possibility of space to kids everywhere”
- has been President of Galleria Real Estate Company since 1994
- her Pomeranian, Saba the Space Dog, has his own space suit & often accompanies her when she lectures at schools
- hopes go on a 5–7-day orbit around the moon or the earth
Born: 1949
Country: USA
Education: Morris Harvey College (now called the University of Charleston) no degree found
Sossina M. Haile
🔬 Materials Science
- Developed the 1st solid acid fuel cells
- Was born in Ethiopia; family fled to the US when she was 10 after soldiers arrested & nearly killed her father who was a member of the transitional parliament
- Worked at Caltech for 18 years before moving to Northwestern University
- Has been recognized for developing new ways of using solar energy to make fuels like hydrogen & methane
- Holds 12 patents
Born: 1966
Country: Ethiopia
Education: MIT BS Materials Science & Engineering 1986, PhD Materials Science & Engineering 1992; UC Berkeley MS Materials Science & Engineering 1988; University of Stuttgart, final Year at MIT PhD
Sarah Josepha Hale nee Buell
✍️ Author
✍️ poet
🔍 editor
- after trying to convince 4 prior presidents to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday, she convinced Abraham Lincoln to do so as a unifying tactic during the Civil War (1863)
- her parents believed in equal education for both genders
- married David Hale in her father's tavern in 1813 & he died in 1822, she wore black for the rest of her life as a sign of perpetual mourning
- her late husband's Freemason lodge financially helped her publish her 1st book of poems & was supportive of her for the remainder of her life
- was one of the first novelists to write a book about slavery, as well as one of the first American woman novelists
- her 1st book described how while slavery hurts and dehumanizes slaves absolutely, it also dehumanizes the masters and slows their world's psychological, moral and technological progress
- preferred the title "editress"
- 1828 until 1836 served as editor of the Ladies' Magazine in Boston
- while working for Godey's she insisted she edit from Boston while her youngest son, William, attended Harvard College
- was an editor at Godey's for forty years, retiring in 1877 when she was almost 90
- published nearly fifty volumes of poetry & novels by the end of her life
- was an advocate for play and physical education as important learning experiences for children
- was an early advocate of higher education for women
- she argued that the woman was "God's appointed agent of morality." (Wikipedia)
- did not support women's suffrage
- was nicknamed "Mother of Thanksgiving"
- raised $30,000 in Boston for the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument
- was honored as the fourth in a series of historical bobblehead dolls created by the New Hampshire Historical Society and sold in their museum store in Concord, New Hampshire
- is featured on a New Hampshire historical marker (number 6) along New Hampshire Route 103 in Newport
- is commemorated on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail
- a box of her correspondence, containing 28 folders, is in the collections of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia (https://omeka.philaathenaeum.org/collections/collections/show/10)
- her poems were printed over the signature Cornelia in local journals and were gathered in The Genius of Oblivion (1823)
- after the death of her husband after only 9 years of marriage she was left to care for her 5 children & ran a hat shop & returned to teaching for a while before she began writing
- the Richards Free Library in Newport, RI bestows the annual Sarah Josepha Hale Award on a New England writer & the first honoree was Robert Frost in 1956
- she fought for property rights for married women and improvements in women’s wages
- was a supporter of Elizabeth Blackwell and her medical training and practice
- supported married women's property rights
- came to write that men were evil and women were good, by nature, with women's mission to bring that goodness to men
- she wanted to eliminate the use of "female" as a noun
- 1811 her father built the Rising Sun Tavern which still stands near South Church in Newport NH
- advocated for women as teachers in the public schools
- always used the term “domestic science” for the housewife’s job
- was one of the first to publish Edgar Allen Poe
- also published Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lucretia Mott, Emma Willard, Susan B. Anthony
Born: 1788
Country: USA
Education: was home-schooled by her mother and elder brother Horatio & self-taught
Mary Elizabeth Hallock-Greenewalt
💡 Inventor
🔍 Classical Piano
- Invented a type of visual music known as Nourathar
- Is a pianist who has performed with the Philadelphia & Pittsburgh Symphonies as a soloist
- Is known for her interpretations of Chopin & as a pioneer in the use of color-light effects used in conjunction with musical performances
- Was born in Beirut; she & her siblings were sent to live with relatives in the US when she was 11 because her mother began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness
- She studied piano at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music & in Vienna
- Named her color organ Sarabth after her mother; received 9 patents for it
- 1946, published "Nourathar: The Fine Art of Light-Color Playing"
- Produced the earliest hand-painted films known to still exist; produced with templates & aerosol sprays, meant to be used with Sarabet
- Held 13 patents
Born: 1871
Country: Lebanon
Education: Philadelphia Conservatory of Music 1893; 1897 spent 1 year in Vienna studying piano with Theodore Leschetizky
Beatrix Ann McCleary Hamburg
🔍 Psychiatry
- none
Born: 1923
Country: USA
Education: Vassar College BA Zoology 1944; Yale School of Medicine MD/Psychiatry 1948
Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer
✊ women's rights activist
🔍 community organizer
✊ and leader of the civil rights movement
Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer
✊ women's rights activist
🔍 community organizer
✊ and leader of the civil rights movement
- known for her use of spiritual hymns and biblical quotes
- was threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by racists, including members of the police, while she was trying to register to vote
- ran for the U.S. House in 1964 but lost
- ran for the Mississippi State Senate in 1971
- 1970 led legal action against the government of Sunflower County, Mississippi, for continued illegal segregation
- was the youngest of 20 children born to her parents
- from the age of 6 lived on a farm where her family & she were sharecroppers & they all picked cotton
- winters of 1924 through 1930, she attended the one-room school provided for the sharecroppers' children, open between picking seasons
- loved reading and excelled in spelling bees and reciting poetry
- left school at age 12 to help support her aging parents
- 13 would pick 200–300 pounds of cotton daily while living with polio
- 1961, a white doctor subjected her to a hysterectomy without her consent while she was undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor
- she & her husband subsequently adopted & raised 4 children
- 1 of her daughters died at age 22 of internal hemorrhaging after she was denied admission to the local hospital because of her mother's activism
- became interested in the civil rights movement in the 1950s
- 1972 was elected as a national party delegate
- 1963 spent 3 days in jail in Mississippi where she was beaten with a baton, it took a month for her to recuperate and suffered permanent damage as a result of a blood clot over her left eye and permanent damage on one of her kidneys
- worked on grassroots-level Head Start programs and Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign
- adamantly opposed abortion, & believed it & birth control were tools used by Whites to control Blacks & limit their population growth
- part of her mission to make land more accessible to African Americans
- the Freedom Farm had three main objectives: to establish an agricultural organization that could supplement the nutritional needs of America's most disenfranchised people; to provide acceptable housing development; and create an entrepreneurial business incubator that would provide resources for new companies as well as retraining for those with limited education but manual labor experience
- the farm disbanded in 1975 due to lack of funding
- is credited with coining the phrase "Mississippi appendectomy", a euphemism for involuntary or uninformed sterilization of black women, a common practice in the South during the 1960s
- her tombstone is engraved with one of her famous quotes, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."1994 the Ruleville post office was named the Fannie Lou Hamer Post Office by an act of Congress
- The Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy was founded in 1997 as a summer seminar and K–12 workshop program
- is one of 28 civil rights icons depicted on the Buffalo, New York Freedom Wall
- 1964, she announced her candidacy for the Mississippi House of Representatives but was barred from the ballot
- famed singer Harry Belafonte was among the donors who provided enough funds to purchase the 640 acres for her farm & the coop store, boutique, and sewing enterprise that grew from it
- 1964, U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to block the television broadcast of her testimony at the Democratic National Convention by scheduling a news conference for the same time but the networks then broadcast it during prime time, giving her speech the ability to reach many more people
- opposed the Vietnam War
- diagnosed with breast cancer in 1976
- Cheryl L. West wrote the play Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, which premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2022
- 1st learned she had the right to vote at age 44
Born: 1917
Country: USA
Education: dropped out of school after the 6th grade to help support her family
Alice Hamilton
⚕️ Industrial Medicine
🔍 toxicology
- did her residency at Hull House in Chicago from 1897 to 1919
- became a professor of pathology at the Woman's Medical School of Northwestern University in 1897
- 1919 became the first woman appointed to the faculty of Harvard University
- was a social-welfare reformer, humanitarian, and peace activist
- is sometimes credited with leading to the founding of the United States' Occupational Safety and Health Administration
- grew up in a privileged environment in Fort Wayne, Indiana
- completed internships at the Northwestern Hospital for Women and Children in Minneapolis and at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Roxbury, MA
- 1895 traveled to Germany with her older sister Edith wherte she planned to study bacteriology & pathology but was met with a great deal of resistance because she was female & returned to the U.S. 1896 to study at Johns Hopkins Medical School for 1 year
- Hull House was her full-time residence from 1897 to 1919
- was Jane Addams' personal physician and volunteered her time at Hull House to teach English and art and also directed the men's fencing and athletic clubs, operated a well-baby clinic, and visited the sick in their homes
- even after moving to Boston to teach at Harvard in 1919 she returned to Hull House and stayed for several months each spring until Jane Addams's death in 1935
- her Illinois commission's efforts resulted in the passage of the first workers' compensation laws in Illinois in 1911, in Indiana in 1915, and occupational disease laws in other states
- 1925, at a Public Health Service conference on the use of lead in gasoline, she testified against the use of lead and warned of the danger it posed to people and the environment. but leaded gasoline was allowed & it wasn't until 1988 that the use of leaded gas was linked to the exposure of children to lead
- pioneered occupational epidemiology and industrial hygiene & also created the specialized field of industrial medicine in the United States
- during World War I, the US Army tasked her with solving a mysterious ailment striking workers at a munitions plant in New Jersey which she eventually linked to their contact with TNT so she recommended workers wear protective clothing to be removed and washed at the end of each shift, solving the problem
- examples of the anti-female discrimination she faced at Harvard were her exclusion from social activities, she could not enter the Harvard Union, attend the Faculty Club, or receive a quota of football tickets, & she was not allowed to march in the university's commencement ceremonies as the male faculty members did
- she & her siblings (3 sisters & 1 brother) were home schooled and completed her early education at a finishing school (Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut)
- 1924, she spent six weeks in the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Soviet Public Health Service, which asked her to survey what the country was doing in the field of industrial medicine
- was never promoted at Harvard and during her teaching career held only a succession of three-year appointments
- was forced into mandatory retirement at the age of 65
- in her eighties and nineties took an active role in campaigning against McCarthyism and what she considered the excesses of American anti-communism
- 1963 at age 94 signed an open letter to President Kennedy asking for early withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam
- wrote more than 80 scientific reports in 40 years
- caught the FBI's attention in 1942 by advocating for clemency for Morris Schappes, a former professor convicted of perjury &, although they monitored her activities & kept a file on her activities for years, they were never able to link her to the Communists & charges were never filed
- is often referred to as the mother of US occupational medicine
- University of Leipzig professors permitted her to attend lectures, as long as she remained “invisible” to the male students
- when employed by the Department of Labor she received no salary but when each report was ready for publication, the government bought it at a negotiated price
- known for her “shoe leather” epidemiology — wearing out the soles of her shoes from all the trips to factories, hospitals and even saloons to carry out research
Born: 1869
Country: USA
Education: Fort Wayne College of Medicine for 1 year before transferring to the University of Michigan Medical School 1893 MD
Margaret Elaine Heafield Hamilton
💻 Computer Science
- Created the term "software engineer" to describe her work
- Developed Universal Systems Language (USL) with its integrated system-to software "Development Before the Fact" preventative life cycle & its automation, the 001 Tool Suite
- Responsible for the software that allowed Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin to land on the Moon
- Wrote software used by US Air Force to search for possibly unfriendly aircraft
- Early in her career wrote software for predicting weather
- 1st programmer hired by NASA for Apollo Program
- 1976, with Saydean Zelden, founded Higher Order Software (HOS) to develop ideas about error prevention & fault tolerance; created USE.IT which was used in many government programs; left company in 1985
- 1986, founded Hamilton Technologies, Inc
Born: 1936
Country: USA
Education: Earlham College BA Mathematics 1958; studied mathematics at University of Michigan before transferring to Earlham College
Marilyn Hamilton
💡 Inventor
- Confined to a wheelchair after a 1978 hang-gliding accident
- Paralympic skier & wheelchair tennis player
- Won Silver Medal in 1988 Winter Paralympics for skiing
- Develops sports wheelchairs
- 1983, won the US Open Wheelchair Tennis singles Championship
- Founder of 4 nonprofits/companies to benefit paralyzed athletes
Born: 1949
Country: USA
Education: Cal Polytechnical State University BS Education 1971
Harmony Hammond
🎨 Art
- taught at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1989–2006
- was a prominent figure in the founding of the feminist art movement in 1970s New York
- was an instructor at the New York Feminist Art Institute
- has been living in New Mexico since 1984
- created sculptures in the early 1970s featuring swaths of fabric, a traditionally feminine material, as a primary material
- her paintings show how they were made and are almost all abstract
- in the 1990s primarily made mixed-media installations that incorporated a range of traditionally non-art materials (such as human hair and corrugated roofing) with traditional oil painting, and in the first decade of the 2000s, her focus was on making monochrome abstract paintings
- has had more than 40 solo exhibitions internationally
- The Harmony Hammond Papers were acquired by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles in 2016
- is often labeled a queer abstractionist, and her work focuses primarily on questioning the signifiers of traditionally feminine materials and practices
- practiced & taught the Japanese martial art of aikido
Born: 1944
Country: USA
Education: Millikin University 1961-63 then transferred to University of Minnesota BA (some sources say BFA) 1967
Paula Therese Hammond-Cunningham
⚛️ Chemical Engineering
- 1st female & person of color appointed as head of the Chemical Engineering Dept at MIT
- Expert in nanotechnology; has discovered polymers that increase the amount of power held by solar cells & created materials that reorganize their own molecules
- Co-founded MIT's Soldier Nanotechnology, a partnership between MIT, the Army, & industry partners to improve soldier "protection & survivability"
- Presented research on virus-based bacterias to Barack Obama in 2009
- Holds 38 patents
Born: 1963
Country: USA
Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1984 BS & 1993 PhD Chemical Engineering; Georgia Institute of Technology MS Chemical Engineering 1988
Julia Terry Hammonds
💡 Inventor
🎨 Fiber arts
- filed her patent in December 1896 & was living in Lebanon, Il at the time
- no other information was available
Born: Unknown
Country: USA
Education: Unknown
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