#OnThisDay, 24 Feb 1968, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - along with her male supervisor and three other men - published a paper confirming the discovery of pulsars. She had built the array, picked up the signal and argued it was not an anomaly. Hewish received the Nobel prize for it in 1974: Bell Burnell did not.
In 2018 Bell Burnell received a £3m prize for her work. She's using it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.
This is Toshiko Yuasa (1909-1980). She was the first woman physicist from Japan. It's 1940 & with her science prospects at home blocked by gender prejudice, she'd managed to get into wartime Paris to do physics research...
This is groundbreaking botanist & cytogeneticist, E.K. Janaki Ammal (1897-1984).
She was the 10th of 19 children in a mixed race family in Kerala, India, with caste adding to the discrimination she faced in life. Ammal chose a life of science over a planned marriage.
"My work is what will survive", she said. She was right. Her achievements are awesome....
Re-posting this 🐤 thread from 2018 which, sadly, is still relevant:
#WomenInSTEM who talk about #harassment and sexual misconduct get a lot of antagonistic & unhelpful replies. @shrewshrew and I (a woman & a man in science) tried to categorize them. #9ReplyGuys
#OnThisDay, 7 Jan 1939, French physicist Marguerite Perey discovers element 87, which she later names francium. It was the last element to be discovered naturally.
Perey was a student of Marie Curie, and was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize but never received it.
This is Elisabeth Wollman (1888-1943). Her life was extraordinary & her legacy is phenomenal.
In collaboration with her husband, Eugène, she was a pioneer of what became molecular genetics. This pic is her Pasteur Institute portrait from the early 1920s.
Their groundbreaking work was carried on by a colleague & their son, leading to a Nobel prize & more.
Happy birthday to chemistry trailblazer Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier (20 January 1758 – 10 February 1836), wife and collaborator of French scientist Antoine Lavoisier (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794).
The Lavoisiers, working closely together, modernized and quantified chemistry and the scientific method, recognized and named oxygen and hydrogen, explained the role that oxygen plays in combustion, 🧵1/n
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who revolutionized our understanding of what stars & the Universe are made of, was born #OTD in 1900.
In 1926, she wrote what is considered the "undoubtedly most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".
She continued in the same spirit - only to be denied a professorship (or even the a proper astronomer position). She finally became a professor at Harvard at 1956(!) & first woman to chair a department.
Happy birthday to trailblazing American computer scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen (1932 – 2020) who made foundational contributions to optimizing compilers, optimizing programs and parallel computing. She was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, where she worked from 1957 to 2002 and as an emeritus fellow afterwards. She was the first woman to win the Turing Prize.
To my lovely #wikipedia editors and fellow #womeninstem, a humble request to flesh out this list and add organisational pages. It is essential to connect us to share resources and for resilience. Happy to add others, too, if someone needs help or does not know how.
At a meeting in Germany that attracts dozens of Nobel prize winners, one of them objected to its focus on diversity, saying “as a male scientist, I have a feeling of discrimination when I am here, in the climate that this meeting is being held.” Science magazine reports that a visibly nervous early-career researcher stood up to respond….
#OnThisDay, 8 Apr 1959, Mary K Hawes initiates a project to create the first universal programming language for computers used by businesses and government. Grace Hopper led the team that then created COBOL. Some mainframes are still using it.
Happy birthday to #astronomer Vera Rubin (neé Cooper, ‘28-‘16) & her discovery that angular motion of galaxies deviates from predictions, 1st evidence for dark matter, now known as 5x as common as matter & the stuff which dictates dynamics of galaxies & evolution of our universe! Nobel committee waited 3 years after she died to reward another for the theory of dark matter.
She found 6 months mat leave post MSc very difficult being
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For #ArtAdventCalendar Day 10: Happy birthday to Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), who published the first computer program. She worked together with Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine (the first - analogue! - #computers), correcting his notes on how to calculate Bernoulli Numbers with the Analytical Engine. 🧵1/n
Are you a #WomanInTech with an interest in #FOSS? The #Pinetta project is looking for devs, designers, and community builders who are interested in contributing to a FOSS #ActivityPub project and shaping both community and technical frameworks. Give us a follow and a shout!
This is a photo of a happy, fulfilled scientist, who has some colossal achievements to her credit.
Meet Nathalie Josso (1934-2022), the French pediatric endocrinologist who isolated & named the anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) that differentiates sex in the fetus, studied intersex, & much more besides.
#OnThisDay, 20 Apr 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie refine radium chloride. The discovery leads to Marie being the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.
The Academy originally planned to award only Pierre and Henri Becquerel. Pierre insisted that Marie should also be included.
Happy birthday to #astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979), trailblazer for women in #astronomy who discovered that hydrogen and helium are the most common elements in the universe.
Born England, she won a scholarship to Newnham College Cambridge in 1919 where she heard a lecture which changed her life. She wrote, “My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.” 🧵