30 Women Who Changed Science

1. 1

   Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)

   Wrote the first published computer algorithm — for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Understood that the machine could manipulate symbols, not just numbers, a century before the idea became standard.

   British Library — Ada Lovelace

2. 2

   Marie Curie (1867-1934)

   Two Nobel Prizes (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911) for work on radioactivity — a term she coined. Only person ever to win Nobels in two different sciences.

   Nobel Prize Organization

3. 3

   Lise Meitner (1878-1968)

   Co-discovered nuclear fission with Otto Hahn. Hahn won the 1944 Nobel Prize alone; Meitner's contribution went unrecognized until element 109 was named meitnerium in her honor.

   American Physical Society

4. 4

   Emmy Noether (1882-1935)

   Proved Noether's theorem — the deepest link between symmetry and conservation laws in physics. Einstein called her 'the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.'

   Association for Women in Mathematics

5. 5

   Barbara McClintock (1902-1992)

   Discovered transposons — 'jumping genes' — in maize, 30 years before her work was accepted. 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

   Nobel Prize Organization

6. 6

   Grace Hopper (1906-1992)

   Pioneered compiler-based programming; developed FLOW-MATIC, the predecessor to COBOL. Made computing accessible to non-specialists; coined 'debugging.'

   National Museum of American History

7. 7

   Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958)

   Produced Photo 51, the X-ray crystallography image that revealed DNA's double-helix structure. Watson and Crick's 1953 model depended on her unpublished data.

   Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

8. 8

   Gertrude Elion (1918-1999)

   Nobel laureate 1988. Developed the first effective leukemia drug, the first antiviral (acyclovir), and the first immunosuppressant for organ transplants — all without a PhD.

   Nobel Prize Organization

9. 9

   Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994)

   Determined the structure of penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin using X-ray crystallography. Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964.

   Royal Society

10. 10

    Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997)

    'First Lady of Physics.' Her experiments disproved the law of conservation of parity; the 1957 Nobel went to male colleagues who proposed the theory she tested.

    American Physical Society

11. 11

    Katherine Johnson (1918-2020)

    Calculated orbital trajectories for Mercury, Apollo 11, and the Space Shuttle. John Glenn refused to fly Friendship 7 until 'the girl' — Johnson — checked the computer's numbers.

    NASA History

12. 12

    Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan

    NASA 'hidden figures' who broke engineering and management barriers at NACA/NASA. Jackson was NASA's first Black female engineer (1958); Vaughan the first Black supervisor (1949).

    NASA History

13. 13

    Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

    *Silent Spring* (1962) launched the modern environmental movement. Documented the effect of DDT on ecosystems, leading to its US ban in 1972.

    US Fish and Wildlife Service

14. 14

    Jane Goodall (b. 1934)

    Transformed the study of chimpanzees and great apes with her long-term observational work at Gombe. Documented tool use, challenging the definition of 'what makes us human.'

    Jane Goodall Institute

15. 15

    Vera Rubin (1928-2016)

    Found the observational evidence for dark matter by measuring galaxy rotation curves. Her work established that ~85% of matter in the universe is unseen.

    Carnegie Institution for Science

16. 16

    Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. 1943)

    Discovered pulsars as a graduate student in 1967. The 1974 Nobel Prize went to her advisor; she has been widely recognized since, including the 2018 $3M Breakthrough Prize.

    Breakthrough Prize Foundation

17. 17

    Tu Youyou (b. 1930)

    Discovered artemisinin — the most effective anti-malarial drug. Nobel Prize 2015. Worked without a medical or PhD degree; estimated to have saved 20M+ lives.

    Nobel Prize Organization

18. 18

    Mary-Claire King (b. 1946)

    Identified BRCA1 in 1990 — the first known breast cancer susceptibility gene. Also pioneered genetic identification of disappeared children during Argentina's Dirty War.

    University of Washington

19. 19

    Jennifer Doudna (b. 1964)

    Co-discovered CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing (2012). Shared 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. First clinical CRISPR therapy approved for sickle cell disease in 2023.

    Nobel Prize Organization

20. 20

    Emmanuelle Charpentier (b. 1968)

    Co-discovered CRISPR-Cas9 with Doudna. Shared 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. First all-women Nobel science laureates in history.

    Nobel Prize Organization

21. 21

    Katalin Karikó (b. 1955)

    mRNA pioneer. Her decades of work on modified mRNA — frequently dismissed and defunded — became the platform for COVID-19 vaccines used by billions. 2023 Nobel Prize.

    Nobel Prize Organization

22. 22

    Frances Arnold (b. 1956)

    Nobel laureate 2018, Chemistry. Developed directed evolution of enzymes — using Darwinian selection to engineer proteins. Enabled sustainable biofuels and pharmaceutical production.

    Nobel Prize Organization

23. 23

    Donna Strickland (b. 1959)

    Nobel laureate 2018, Physics, for chirped pulse amplification — the technique behind laser eye surgery and modern high-intensity lasers. Only the third woman ever to win a Physics Nobel.

    Nobel Prize Organization

24. 24

    Andrea Ghez (b. 1965)

    2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Used adaptive optics to achieve unprecedented imaging resolution.

    Nobel Prize Organization

25. 25

    Claudia Goldin (b. 1946)

    2023 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences — first solo woman ever to win it. Her historical analysis of women's participation in the labor market reshaped how economists study gender and work.

    Nobel Prize Organization

26. 26

    Katie Bouman (b. 1989)

    Led development of the algorithm that produced the first image of a black hole (Event Horizon Telescope, 2019). Age 29 at the time.

    MIT CSAIL

27. 27

    Fei-Fei Li (b. 1976)

    Founded ImageNet — the dataset that launched modern computer vision and catalyzed the deep learning revolution. Stanford professor and co-director of the Institute for Human-Centered AI.

    Stanford HAI

28. 28

    Kizzmekia Corbett (b. 1986)

    NIH immunologist whose pre-pandemic coronavirus spike-protein work enabled the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine within 66 days of the virus's genome being sequenced.

    NIH Vaccine Research Center

29. 29

    Jocelyn Kaiser, Meghan Azad, Xiaowei Zhuang — the current bench

    A representative sample of mid-career women shaping contemporary research: molecular imaging, microbiome science, and super-resolution microscopy.

    Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators

30. 30

    Pardis Sabeti (b. 1975)

    Harvard computational geneticist whose algorithms detect genomic signatures of recent natural selection. Critical during the 2014 Ebola outbreak for real-time genome surveillance.

    Broad Institute

Sources

• Nobel Prize Organization
• Association for Women in Science
• Smithsonian National Museum of American History — Women in STEM

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