A donor requested that I list the “top ten most awesome female scientists.” I probably should have done this earlier in the night when I still had some mental faculties left, but here’s an attempt for female scientists that I happen to like, in no particular order:
- Rosalind Franklin
- Jane Goodall
- Linda Buck
- Barbara McClintock
- Elizabeth Blackburn
- Martha Cowles Chase
- Elizabeth Blackwell
- Grace Hopper
- Marie Curie
- Lynn Margulis (if we can get in a time machine and forget that she became an AIDS denialist, ugh)
…The fact that this list was incredibly hard for me to make is really, really sad.
This is post 43 of 49 of Blogathon. Donate to the Secular Student Alliance here.
25 comments
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Kaotik4266
June 17, 2012 at 3:24 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
No love for Ada Lovlace? Although I suppose she was more a mathematician than a scientist.
Brian
June 17, 2012 at 3:28 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
If it’s “awesome” we’re looking for in particular, then the list is incomplete without Lise Meitner, who helped work out the mechanics of nuclear fission while on the run from the Nazis.
Suido
June 17, 2012 at 3:40 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Hurrah for Elizabeth Blackburn, Australia’s first female Nobel prize winner. The two leading newspapers in Melbourne and Sydney had markedly different reactions to the award:
The Age/Sydney Morning Herald – front page.
Herald Sun/Daily Telegraph – buried around page 15ish.
No prizes for guessing which is the right wing, Murdoch controlled rag.
Dianne
June 17, 2012 at 3:52 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
What about Jocelyn Bell Burnell?
slc1
June 17, 2012 at 5:04 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
How about the following:
Chien-Shiung Wu
Lisa Randall
Maria Goeppert Mayer
Lisa Meitner
Sheila Crosby
June 17, 2012 at 5:16 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Caroline Herschel, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Henrietta Leavitt, for starters.
Dan!
June 17, 2012 at 5:38 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
It’s funny, I can easily name dozens of awesome female scientists. However it is much more difficult to name dozens of FAMOUS female scientists.
george.w
June 17, 2012 at 5:56 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Dr. Nora Volkow, for her work into the neurochemistry of addiction.
seanokeefe
June 17, 2012 at 7:56 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
+1 Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
Pleasingly, the most recent episode of the BBC’s flagship science programme Horizon was presented by Lucie Green, Helen Czerski and Liz Bonnin. Let’s hope this wasn’t a one-off.
Izzy
June 17, 2012 at 8:58 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
How about Melissa Franklin, chair of Harvard physics dept.? She was the first tenured prof. at HU, has worked at Fermi labs in Chicago for decades, and is awfully funny. Here’s an interview: http://bigthink.com/ideas/17078
anatman
June 17, 2012 at 11:01 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
how about hypatia of alexandria, florence nightingale (much more than a nurse), and emmy noether, whose eponymous theorem is essential to physics just to name female mathematicians?
embertine
June 18, 2012 at 12:18 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
*Amazing Grace fistbump*
She is on my list of people I would want at my dream dinner party, along with Archimedes, Feynman, Hypatia, Boudicca and Leonardo.
Factoid: if you put “leonardo” into Google, it comes up with di Caprio before da Vinci.
I DON’T WANT TO LIVE ON THIS PLANET ANYMORE
bruce
June 18, 2012 at 1:36 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Mary Anning?
PDX_Greg
June 18, 2012 at 2:51 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
No Eugenie Scott?
Carlos
June 18, 2012 at 9:40 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
What about Helen Taussig who pretty much created the field of pediatric cardiology?
georgemontgomery
June 18, 2012 at 11:54 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Candace Pert for her work with neuropeptides?
redleg
June 18, 2012 at 11:17 PM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
http://womeninplanetaryscience.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/sarah-noble-and-the-congressional-science-fellowship/
I’ll vouch for Sarah Noble. Brilliant and female. And then her mentor at Brown, Carle Pieters.
I might be biased because I worked (briefly) with these brilliant women on the topics of space weathering, lunar regolith, and spectroscopy as a grad student over a decade ago, but they are both at the top of their field.
roland72
June 19, 2012 at 9:23 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Emmy Noether – incredibly influential physicist
Mish
June 19, 2012 at 3:13 PM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Athene Donald
Prof. Bleen
June 21, 2012 at 7:26 PM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
I would add Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, who won the Nobel Prize for her contributions to early developmental genetics, and Lise Meitner, who with her nephew, Otto Fritsch, first described the mechanism of nuclear fission in uranium.
Nobody in particular
June 26, 2012 at 12:35 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Sara Seager
Confused
June 30, 2012 at 12:36 PM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
I see your Lise Meitner and raise you one Rita Levi-Montalcini, who, excluded from the establishment by being a female Jew in Mussolini’s Italy, set up a developmental biology lab *in her attic*, and did pioneering work on neurogenesis during WWII.
Although I’m a bit torn about looking to developmental biology for great female scientists (and there have been many) because it’s traditionally been condescendingly treated as an “acceptable” academic discipline for women to be interested in (a bit like obstetrics and gynaecology in medicine). Doesn’t mean I don’t think Nicole Le Douarin is any less awesome though.
Pluto Animus
July 2, 2012 at 2:15 PM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Don’t forget memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus….
ik
July 4, 2012 at 10:54 PM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
yeah, I am wondering about her!
Ray
July 13, 2012 at 1:04 PM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
I can’t believe you left Susan Blackmore off that list! I’ve learned more about consciousness and neuroscience from her website and books than anyone else except maybe Dan Dennett.