Spotlight on Women in Science

Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband figured out that disease-causing pathogens can spread through the air like smoke

Author Dava Sobel discusses how she discovered the many forgotten female scientists who were mentored by Marie Curie in early 20th-century Paris

Born into poverty and abandoned by her parents, Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo rises from a life selling sweets in the street to become the first female Dominican doctor in 1911

Neuroscientist Lore Thaler speaks about her efforts to make echolocation training more accessible

A Chinese medical textbook published in 1511 led to a novel about an all-but-forgotten female doctor who practiced during the Ming Dynasty

Space scientists within NASA and outside it feel betrayed by the Trump administration’s changes at the agency, which was known for promoting inclusion in science

We talk to Cristina Gonzalez, a physician at New York University, who runs a lab that uses simulations to help medical professionals check their implicit bias at the exam room door.

Marie Curie is well known for her chemistry achievements but less so for helping other women succeed in science

Linguist and sociophonetician Nicole Holliday analyzes the language used by candidates in the recent presidential and vice presidential debates

Three scientists are honored for developing a class of blockbuster weight-loss drugs. Is a Nobel prize on the way?

Starting with her rejection of an FDA application for thalidomide in 1960, physician and pharmacist Frances Oldham Kelsey took a stand against the now infamous drug

Lynn Conway, a trans woman and advocate for LGBTQ rights, was underappreciated and often underrecognized for her work in chip design

Historian and ecologist Laura J. Martin rediscovers the female scientists who established ecological restoration in her book Wild by Design

Ada Lovelace’s wisdom about the first general-purpose computer can be found buried in the appendix of another paper

Awarding Rosalind Franklin a Nobel Prize posthumously for her role in DNA discovery is the honorable—and scientific—thing to do

Was a teenager named Alessandra Giliani the Western world’s first female anatomist? In 14th-century Italy, women were strictly barred from medical research. One flouted that rule—disguised as a man.

In 1949 physicist Chien-Shiung Wu devised an experiment that documented evidence of entanglement. Her findings have been hidden in plain sight for more than 70 years

Yvonne Y. Clark, known as Y.Y. throughout her career, had a lifetime of groundbreaking achievements as a Black female mechanical engineer. The third season of the Lost Women of Science podcast begins at the start of her story, during her unconventional childhood in the segregated South

Jane Rigby, Webb’s operations project scientist, discusses how NASA plans to wring as much science as possible from the $10-billion observatory

A new generation of scientists are challenging the biased, hierarchical status quo

Lost Women of Science digs deep to uncover stories of scientists that have long been overlooked

Women are investigating critical climate crisis problems such as the stability of giant ice sheets

The groundbreaking scientist ushered in a revolution in how we think about the universe. She also lived by a set of principles that made her an exceptional human being

America’s first woman in space worked to make STEM education more equitable and inclusive, with a special emphasis on encouraging participation by girls