Timeline of women in science in the United States explained

This is a timeline of women in science in the United States.

19th Century

• 1848: Maria Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she had discovered a new comet the year before.^[1]
• 1853: Jane Colden was the only female biologist mentioned by Carl Linnaeus in his masterwork Species Plantarum.^[2]
• 1889: Mary Emilie Holmes became the first female Fellow of the Geological Society of America.^[3]
• 1889: Susan La Flesche Picotte became the first Native American woman to become a physician in the United States.^{[4] [5]}
• 1893: Florence Bascom became the second woman to earn her Ph.D. in geology in the United States, and the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.^{[6] [7]} Geologists consider her to be the "first woman geologist in this country [America]."^[8]
• 1896: Florence Bascom became the first woman to work for the United States Geological Survey.^{[9] [10]}

20th Century

• 1901: Florence Bascom became the first female geologist to present a paper before the Geological Survey of Washington.^[11]
• 1903: Marie Curie became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, awarded in Physics, and went on to also win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She performed pioneering research in radioactivity, and discovered two elements (polonium and radium).^[12]
• 1912: Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied the bright-dim cycle periods of Cepheid stars, then found a way to calculate the distance from such stars to Earth.^[13]
• 1924: Florence Bascom became the first woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America.^[11]
• 1925: Florence Sabin became the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences.^[14]
• 1928: Alice Evans became the first woman elected president of the Society of American Bacteriologists.^[15]
• 1936: Edith Patch became the first female president of the Entomological Society of America.^[16]

1940s

• 1942: American geologist Marguerite Williams became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in geology in the United States. She completed her doctorate, entitled A History of Erosion in the Anacostia Drainage Basin, at Catholic University.^{[17] [18]}
• 1947: Gerty Cori became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which she received along with Carl Ferdinand Cori "for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen", and Bernardo Alberto Houssay "for his discovery of the part played by the hormone of the anterior pituitary lobe in the metabolism of sugar".^{[19] [20] [21]}
• 1947: Marie Maynard Daly became the first Black woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry, and went on to perform research that would define how cholesterol clogged arteries, paving the way for a broad understanding that diet affects heart health.^[22]
• 1949: Dorothy Vaughan becomes the first African-American woman to supervise a group of staff at the Langely Research Center, a NASA field center.^[23]

1950s

• 1950: Isabella Abbott became the first Native Hawaiian woman to receive a PhD in any science; hers was in botany.^{[24] [25]}
• 1950: Esther Lederberg was the first to isolate lambda bacteriophage, a DNA virus, from Escherichia coli K-12.^[26]
• 1952: Grace Hopper completed what is considered to be the first compiler, a program that allows a computer user to use English-like words instead of numbers. It was known as the A-0 compiler.^[27]
• 1956: The Wu experiment was a nuclear physics experiment conducted in 1956 by the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, born in China but having become an American citizen in 1954, in collaboration with the Low Temperature Group of the US National Bureau of Standards.^{[28] [29] [30] [31]} That experiment showed that parity could be violated in weak interaction.^[32]

1960s

• 1960: Rosalyn Yalow received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones" along with Roger Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally who received it "for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain".^[33]
• 1962: Katherine Johnson performed the calculations for the NASA orbital mission, launching John Glenn as the first person into orbit and returning them safely.^{[34] [35]}
• 1963: Maria Goeppert Mayer became the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics; she shared the prize with J. Hans D. Jensen "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure” and Eugene Paul Wigner "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".^{[36] [37] [38]} She was born in Poland, but became a U.S. citizen in 1933.^{[38] [39]}
• 1965: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science.^[40] Her thesis was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns."^[41]

1970s

• 1975: Chien-Shiung Wu, born in China but having become an American citizen in 1954, became the first female president of the American Physical Society.^{[29] [30] [31]}
• 1976: Margaret Burbidge, born in England, was named as the first female president of the American Astronomical Society.^{[42] [43]}
• 1977: Rosalyn Yalow received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones"; she shared it with Roger Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally "for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain."^[44]
• 1978: Anna Jane Harrison became the first female president of the American Chemical Society.^[45]
• 1978: Mildred Cohn served as the first female president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, then called the American Society of Biological Chemists.^{[46] [47] [48]}

1980s

• 1982: Nephrologist Leah Lowenstein became the first woman dean of a co-educational medical school in the United States.^[49]
• 1983: Barbara McClintock received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of genetic transposition; she was the first woman to receive that prize without sharing it, and the first American woman to receive any unshared Nobel Prize.^{[50] [51] [52]}
• 1984: Kathryn D. Sullivan becomes the first American woman to walk in space.^[53]
• 1988: Patricia Bath was the first African American woman to receive a medical patent, which was her invention of laser cataract treatment.^[54]
• 1988: Gertrude B. Elion received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with James W. Black and George H. Hitchings "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment".^[55]

1990s

• 1990: Antonia Novello became the first woman, first person of color, and first Hispanic to serve as Surgeon General of the United States.^[56]
• 1991: Doris Malkin Curtis became the first woman president of the Geological Society of America.^[57]
• 1992: Edith M. Flanigen became the first woman awarded the Perkin Medal (widely considered the highest honor in American industrial chemistry) for her outstanding achievements in applied chemistry.^{[58] [59]} The medal especially recognized her syntheses of aluminophosphate and silicoaluminophosphate molecular sieves as new classes of materials.^[59]
• 1992: Mae Jemison becomes the first Black woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour.^[60]
• 1993: Ellen Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman to go to space when she served aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.^{[61] [5]}
• 1998: Nurse Fannie Gaston-Johansson became the first African-American woman tenured full professor at Johns Hopkins University.^[62]
• 1998: Rita R. Colwell became the first female director of the National Science Foundation.^[63]

21st Century

2000s

• 2004: Linda B. Buck received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Richard Axel "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system".^[64]
• 2009: Carol W. Greider received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Elizabeth H. Blackburn (Blackburn was a native of Australia, but lived in the United States since 1975, and became a naturalized citizen in September 2003^[65]) and Jack W. Szostak "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase".^[66]

2010s

• 2010: Marcia McNutt became the first female director of the United States Geological Survey.^[67]
• 2016: Marcia McNutt became the first woman president of the American National Academy of Sciences.^[68]
• 2018: Frances Arnold received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the directed evolution of enzymes"; she shared it with George Smith and Gregory Winter, who received it "for the phage display of peptides and antibodies".^[69] This made Frances the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.^[70]
• 2019: Karen Uhlenbeck won the Abel Prize for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics."^[71] She is the first woman to win the prize.^[72]

2020s

• 2020: Kathryn D. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, descended 35,810 feet to the Challenger Deep, making her the first person to both walk in space and to reach the deepest known point in the ocean.^[73]

Notes and References

1. Book: Mary Wyer. Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies. 2001. Psychology Press. 978-0-415-92606-5. 3.
2. Oakes, Elizabeth H., Encyclopedia of World Scientists,Infobase Publishing, 2007, p. 147
3. Book: Edwin Butt Eckel. The Geological Society of America: Life History of a Learned Society. 1982. Geological Society of America. 978-0-8137-1155-3. 36.
4. Web site: Susan La Flesche Picotte First N.A. Female Physician . Nebraska Studies . 2019-05-28 . mdy-all.
5. Web site: Women of Color in STEM . Marysville University website . 9 January 2020 . 13 Jun 2020.
6. Web site: Florence Bascom papers, 1883-1938 . Dla.library.upenn.edu . 2018-07-28.
7. Web site: Clary. R.M.. Great expectations: Florence Bascom (1842–1945) and the education of early US women geologists. Geological society of London Publications. Special Publications. 10 October 2017. 281, 123-135.
8. Web site: A Life of Firsts: Florence Bascom. Schneidermann. Jill. July 1997. GSA Today. Geological Society of America.
9. Web site: The Stone Lady, Florence Bascom (U.S. National Park Service) . Nps.gov . 1945-06-18 . 2018-07-28.
10. Web site: A Life of Firsts: Florence Bascom. Schneidermann. Jill. July 1997. GSA Today. Geological Society of America.
11. Web site: irishawg . Women in Geoscience Series – Irish Association for Women in Geosciences . Irishawg.wordpress.com . 2016-08-20 . 2018-07-28.
12. Web site: Marie Curie Facts . Nobelprize.org . Nobel Media . 14 Jun 2020.
13. http://web.mit.edu/~invent/iow/leavitt.html Lemelson-MIT Program
14. Web site: Engineering Education Blog: First Woman Elected to National Academy of Science . K-grayengineeringeducation.com . 2014-02-16.
15. Time. January 9, 1928. Medicine:Bacteriologists. https://web.archive.org/web/20121020042429/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,881734,00.html?iid=chix-sphere. dead. October 20, 2012. November 26, 2009.
16. Book: Tiffany K. Wayne. American Women of Science Since 1900. 2011. ABC-CLIO. 978-1-59884-158-9. 514.
17. Web site: Williams. Marguerite. A History of Erosion in the Anacostia Basin. World Cat. 8 March 2014.
18. Web site: Women's History Month – Marguerite Thomas Williams. University of the District of Columbia. en-US. 2018-09-24.
19. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1947. Nobel Foundation. 28 July 2007.
20. Web site: Gerty Cori - Facts . Nobelprize.org . 1957-10-26 . 2018-08-19.
21. Web site: Nobel Prize for Medicine 2015 winners . Erewise . 2018-08-20.
22. Web site: Biography.com Editors . Marie M. Daly Biography . The Biography.com website . A&E Television Networks . 13 June 2020.
23. Web site: Witter . Brad . Katherine Johnson and 9 Other Black Female Pioneers in Science . biography.com . 13 June 2020.
24. Book: Arlene B. Hirschfelder. Paulette Fairbanks Molin. The Extraordinary Book of Native American Lists. 2012. Scarecrow Press. 978-0-8108-7709-2. 278–.
25. Web site: 'Seaweed lady' Isabella Abbott dies . Montereyherald.com . 2018-08-19 . 2018-08-23.
26. "Lederberg, E. M., 1950, "Lysogenicity in Escherichia coli strain K-12", Microbial Genetics Bulletin, 1, pp. 5-9, Jan. 1950, Univ. of Wisconsin (Evelyn Maisel Witkin, Editor), Ohio State University,, call No. 33-M-4,, Accession Number: AEH8282UW" http://www.estherlederberg.com/Censorship/LambdaW.html
27. http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1952 Computer History Museum | Timeline of Computer History : Year 1952 Entries
28. Wu . C. S. . Ambler . E. . Hayward . R. W. . Hoppes . D. D. . Hudson . R. P. . 1957 . Experimental Test of Parity Conservation in Beta Decay . . 105 . 4 . 1413–1415 . 1957PhRv..105.1413W . 10.1103/PhysRev.105.1413. free .
29. News: Chien-Shiung Wu . William Dickie . . February 18, 1997 . 2014-02-16. William Dickie .
30. Chiang, Tsai-Chien (2014). Madame Chien-Shiung Wu: The First Lady of Physics Research. pg. 80-81. World Scientific. .
31. Wang, Zuoyue (1970–80). "Wu Chien-Shiung". Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 25. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 363–368. .
32. Book: Eberhard Zeidler. Quantum Field Theory III: Gauge Theory: A Bridge between Mathematicians and Physicists. 17 August 2011. Springer Science & Business Media. 978-3-642-22421-8. 196–.
33. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1977. Nobel Foundation. 28 July 2007.
34. Web site: NASA Content Administrator . Glenn Orbits the Earth . NASA.gov. 20 February 2015 .
35. Web site: Shetterly . Margot Lee . Katherine Johnson Biography . NASA.gov. 22 November 2016 .
36. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1963 . Nobel Foundation . 9 October 2008.
37. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1963 . Nobelprize.org . 2013-09-06.
38. Book: Des Julie. The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science. 2010. Feminist Press at CUNY. 978-1-55861-655-4. 163.
39. Web site: Mayer, Maria Goeppert . Astr.ua.edu . 2013-09-06.
40. Web site: Steel . Martha Vickers . 2001 . Women in Computing: Experiences and Contributions Within the Emerging Computing Industry . Computing History Museum.
41. Web site: UW-Madison Computer Science Ph.D.s Awarded, May 1965 - August 1970. UW-Madison Computer Sciences Department. 2010-11-08.
42. Book: Tiffany K. Wayne. American Women of Science Since 1900. 2011. ABC-CLIO. 978-1-59884-158-9. 1021.
43. http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/brucemedalists/burbidgem/ The Bruce Medalists: Margaret Burbidge
44. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1977. 2020-06-09. NobelPrize.org. en-US.
45. Web site: ACS President: Anna Jane Harrison (1912-1998) . Acs.org . 2014-02-16.
46. Web site: ASBMB . ASBMB . 2018-12-20.
47. Web site: ASBMB Presidents :: 1978 – Mildred Cohn . Asbmb.org . 2018-12-20.
48. Web site: Mildren Cohn (1913–2009) - American Chemical Society . Acs.org . 2018-12-20.
49. Angelo. Michael. Varrato. Matt. 2011-10-01. Leah Lowenstein, MD Nation's first female Dean of a co-ed medical school (1981). 50 and Forward: Posters.
50. Web site: Barbara McClintock . Nasonline.org . 2018-03-30 . 2018-08-19.
51. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1983. Nobel Foundation. 28 July 2007.
52. http://issuu.com/bibliotecabiologia/docs/bionoticias_27-02-2012/102 ISSUU - BioNoticias by Biblioteca Biología
53. Web site: 2017-01-26. Former Astronaut and NOAA Administrator Kathy D. Sullivan Named National Air and Space Museum's Lindbergh Fellow. 2020-06-10. National Air and Space Museum. en.
54. Patricia E. Bath, US Patent 4,744,360, Apparatus for ablating and removing cataract lenses, issued May 17, 1988 (filed Dec. 18, 1986). Retrieved February 24, 2019
55. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1988. Nobel Foundation. 28 July 2007.
56. Web site: U.S. National Library of Medicine . Dr. Antonia Novello . Changing the Face of Medicine website . National Institutes of Health, Health & Human Services . 14 June 2020.
57. Book: Margaret W. Rossiter. Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World Since 1972. 21 February 2012. JHU Press. 978-1-4214-0233-8. 249–. Margaret W. Rossiter.
58. Web site: Society of Chemical Industry - Perkin Medal . www.soci.org . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20130326124413/http://www.soci.org/Awards/America-Group-Awards/Perkin-Medal . 2013-03-26.
59. 10.1021/cen-v070n010.p025 . 70 . Edith M. Flanigen Wins Perkin Medal . Chemical & Engineering News . 25 . Stinson S. 1992 . 10 .
60. Book: Hine, Darlene Clarke. Black Women in America. Oxford University Press. 2005. 9780195223750. New York, New York. 140.
61. Web site: Space Today Online -- Man In Space Firsts -- table of contents. www.spacetoday.org. 2019-10-08.
62. Web site: A farewell celebration for Nursing's Fannie Gaston-Johansson. St Angelo. Steven. 2014-07-01. The Hub. en. 2020-03-28.
63. Web site: US NSF - Office of the Director - List of NSF Directors, 1950-present. 2020-06-09. www.nsf.gov.
64. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2004. Nobel Foundation. 28 July 2007.
65. Web site: UCSF's Elizabeth Blackburn Receives Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine | UC San Francisco . Ucsf.edu . 2009-10-05 . 2018-08-20.
66. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009. Nobel Foundation. 28 July 2007.
67. Web site: Marcia K McNutt.
68. News: Science Editor-in-Chief Marcia McNutt Elected President of the National Academy of Sciences. 2016-02-16. AAAS - The World's Largest General Scientific Society. 2018-08-26. en.
69. Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018
70. Web site: Frances Arnold Becomes First American Woman To Win Nobel Prize In Chemistry | HuffPost . Huffingtonpost.com . 3 October 2018. 2018-10-04.
71. Web site: Citation by the Abel Prize Committee . The Abel Prize . March 19, 2019.
72. News: Chang . Kenneth . Karen Uhlenbeck Is First Woman to Receive Abel Prize in Mathematics – Dr. Uhlenbeck helped pioneer geometric analysis, developing techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians. . March 19, 2019 . . March 19, 2019.
73. News: Murphy. Heather. 2020-06-08. First American Woman to Walk in Space Reaches Deepest Spot in the Ocean. en-US. The New York Times. 2020-06-10. 0362-4331.