Tag Archives: profiles

Nine Influential Women and Transgender Scientists to Know

Image of Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958) was a white English chemist and X-ray crystallographer, photographed DNA before the men who are credited with its discovery figured out other things about it. Her work was essential to figuring out other structures as well, including graphite and viruses.

Image of Dr. Maathai
Wangari Maathai

Wangari Muta Maathai (1940-2011) is the Kenyan researcher who initiated and lead Africa’s Green Belt Movement, a project which spread across the continent. Due to Dr. Maathai’s efforts and encouragement, over 30 million trees have been planted. She was Africa’s first woman to win the Novel Prize.

Image of Stephanie Wkolek
Stephanie Wkolek

Kevlar was invented in 1965 by Stephanie Kwolek (1923 – 2014), a white American chemist. She was one of the very few women working as a chemist for Dupont (a very large chemical research company). Her coworkers laughed at her and the fibers that formed in one of her experiments. Bet they aren’t laughing now.

Image of Dorothy Vaughan
Dorothy Vaughan

Dorothy Vaughan (1910-2008) was a lead human computer for NASA when the organization began to transition from human computers to the early room-sized computers. She taught herself computer programming and became NASA’s first black woman team leader amid an environment swirling with both racism and sexism.

Image of Marie Curie
Marie Curie, sometimes also referred to as Madame Curie

Marie Curie (1867 – 1934) was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist. Even now, she is the only person to ever receive the Nobel Prize in two different sciences, and the first woman to be awarded one at all. She was friends with Albert Einstein, who wrote her a very touching letter of support when the man-dominated field turned ugly and vile towards her for being so good at what she did while also being a woman. You can read it here. Fair warning: it made me cry! She died young due to heavy exposure to the radiation she discovered. As she was the first person to work with it, no one knew yet that it was dangerous.

Image of Chien-Shiung Wu
Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu, 吳健雄, (1912-1997) was a Chinese-American experimental physicist famous for the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. Her discovery earned her the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978 and contributed to her colleagues winning the Novel Prize in Physics. Her various significant contributions to nuclear physics earned her nicknames such as “First Lady of Physics” and “The Chinese Madame Curie.”

Image of Laurence Michael Dillon, depicting him both before and after utilizing testosterone treatments.
Laurence Michael Dillon

Laurence Michael Dillon (1915-1962), a white Brit, was the author of “Self: A Study in Endocrinology and Ethics,” which may be the first book about transgender identity and gender transitioning. He described transgender identification as innate and unaffected by psychotherapy, and advocated hormones and surgery as an alternative. He is the first person known to have undergone phalloplasty (surgery to create a phallus), and personally aided in the surgery of Roberta Cowell, Brittain’s first patient to undergo bottom surgery.

Image of Ben Barres
Ben Barres

Ben Barres (1954 – 2017) was an American neurologist who worked at Harvard and revolutionized our understanding of the brain (primarily by showing that the importance of the glia). He was well known for being a good mentor and for bringing people of other minorities up with him. He was also the first openly transgender person in the National Academy of Sciences.

Image of Lynn Conway
Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway (born Jan 2, 1938), is a white American computer scientist who is credited with work used in most modern computer processors today. Her journey involves being fired for revealing that she was a woman who intended to transition to female both medically and in terms of gender role. Transitioning caused her to lose access to her children because of the law at the time. She started a new life in “stealth mode” where she got a new programming job without telling anyone she was transgender, and eventually came out again after it was safer for her to do so.