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What happened
Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett is an African American viral immunologist on the front lines of the global research for a COVID-19 vaccine. Unlike the common flu, COVID-19 has a significantly higher death rate which has caused a pandemic that has killed millions around the world since the beginning of 2020.

Why is it important
Older individuals are more at risk for becoming infected with COVID due to the natural aging process, which brings diminished immunity. Also there is overwhelming evidence of the unusually high impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, including especially African Americans. Black Americans comprise 13% of the U.S. population but so far have accounted for 25% of the deaths.

The knowledge that an African American woman led in the development of the vaccine could encourage Blacks and other ethnic groups to take it. Her scientific work coupled with her well-publicized voice encouraging people to get vaccinated will help save millions of lives.

Details of the event
Dr. Corbett graduated from Hillsborough High School in 2004, and in 2005, she was a summer intern at SUNY Stonybrook Labs where she studied a bacteria that causes scarlet fever in humans. In 2008, she received a BS in biological sciences, with a secondary major in sociology, from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She obtained her PhD in microbiology and immunology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014.

Dr. Corbett began her research at the National Institutes for Health (NIH) working on the development of vaccines for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), two types of coronaviruses. Along with members of her team, Dr. Corbett identified the "spike protein" in COVID-19, when the virus emerged in December 2019. That spike protean infects the person with the virus.

Because of that work, Dr. Corbett was chosen to lead the team of scientists who partnered with the biotechnology company Moderna in development of a vaccine that causes the body's immune system to react when the spike protein is detected, thus blocking the infection process. On March 3, 2020, Dr. Corbett shared her research with President Donald Trump during his NIH tour. Three days later, the president signed a bill authorizing an $8.3 billion dollar emergency coronavirus response, which included at least $3 billion for accelerated research on a vaccine and treatment.

Lasting impact
Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett's research helped develop the Moderna vaccine which has and continues to save millions of lives.

What we learned from this event
The accomplishments of African Americans have long been ignored or overlooked by much of the scientific community and the general public. Dr. Corbett's well-publicized scientific accomplishments, her vibrant African American role model status, and her powerful voice will make such practices a thing of the past.

For additional information, go to BlackPast.org.

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Kizzmekia Corbett (1986- ) [Children's Edition] *

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What happened Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett is an African American viral immunologist on the front lines of the global research for a COVID-19 vaccine. Unlike the common flu, COVID-19 has a significantly higher death rate which has caused a pandemic that has killed millions around the world since the beginning of 2020.

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DK Find Out! | Fun Facts for Kids on Animals, Earth, History and more!

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Visit DK Find Out! to learn about dinosaurs, space, animals, nature & more. Fun learning activities for kids with videos, quizzes & galleries at DKFindOut.com

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Tahani Amer | Program Executive at Earth Science Division of Science Mission Directorate – NASA Solar System Exploration

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“I’m a program executive in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.”

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Table of Contents

Liu Yang, (born October 6, 1978, Zhengzhou, Henan province, China), Chinese astronaut and the first Chinese woman in space.

Liu joined the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in 1997 and learned to fly at Changchun No. 1 Flight College. She became a pilot of cargo planes. Liu attained the rank of major and became deputy head of her flight unit. She joined the astronaut corps in 2010.

Liu was launched into space on June 16, 2012, with two other crew members, commander Jing Haipeng and operator Liu Wang, aboard Shenzhou 9, which accomplished China's first crewed space docking when it docked with the space module Tiangong 1. Liu Yang was in charge of medical experiments during the mission.

Liu made her second flight into space on June 5, 2022, as part of the Shenzhou 14 mission with commander Chen Dong and operator Cai Xuzhe. Shenzhou 14 docked with the Tianhe module of the Tiangong space station. Liu and her fellow crew members planned to stay aboard Tiangong for six months and supervise the addition of the Mengtian and Wentian science modules to the station.

Erik Gregersen

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Liu Yang | Biography, Spaceflights, & Facts

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Liu Yang, (born October 6, 1978, Zhengzhou, Henan province, China), Chinese astronaut and the first Chinese woman in space. Liu joined the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in 1997 and learned to fly at Changchun No. 1 Flight College. She became a pilot of cargo planes.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson, (born October 5, 1958, New York, New York, U.S.), American astronomer who popularized science with his books and frequent appearances on radio and television.
(Read Neil deGrasse Tyson's Britannica essay on public science.)
When Tyson was nine years old, his interest in astronomy was sparked by a trip to the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Tyson received a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1980 and a master's degree in astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983. He began writing a question-and-answer column for the University of Texas's popular astronomy magazine StarDate, and material from that column later appeared in his books Merlin's Tour of the Universe (1989) and Just Visiting This Planet (1998).

Tyson then earned a master's (1989) and a doctorate in astrophysics (1991) from Columbia University, New York City. He was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University from 1991 to 1994, when he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist. His research dealt with problems relating to galactic structure and evolution. He became acting director of the Hayden Planetarium in 1995 and director in 1996. From 1995 to 2005 he wrote monthly essays for Natural History magazine, some of which were collected in Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries (2007), and in 2000 he wrote an autobiography, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist. His later books included Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017) and Letters from an Astrophysicist (2019).

As director of the Hayden Planetarium, Tyson oversaw a complete replacement of the facility, which opened in 2000. The new planetarium's exhibit categorized the solar system's bodies into groups. Pluto was not classified with either the terrestrial or Jovian planets but was grouped with the Kuiper belt objects. That decision (made six years before the International Astronomical Union designated Pluto as a dwarf planet) proved quite controversial, and Tyson was deluged with angry letters. He wrote about that experience in The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (2009), in which he attributed some of the sentimental attachment to Pluto's planethood to cultural factors such as Pluto being the only planet discovered by an American (astronomer Clyde Tombaugh) and having the popular cartoon character of Mickey Mouse 's dog named after it.

Aside from his many books, Tyson was a well-known popularizer of science on television and radio. He appeared frequently on such talk shows as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. In 2004 he was host of the four-episode television series Origins, which examined the origins of the universe, stars, planets, and life. From 2006 to 2011 he was the host of the television series NOVA scienceNOW, and, beginning in 2009, he was also host of the weekly radio show StarTalk. From 2015 Tyson presided over a television talk show based on his radio program, and he also wrote several companion books, including Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going (2021). In 2014 he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a "continuation" (as he termed it) of astronomer Carl Sagan's popular series Cosmos (1980). He also made occasional appearances as himself in films and on television. He voiced an imaginary weasel in the children's animated movie Ice Age: Collision Course (2016).

In 2018 several women accused Tyson of sexual misconduct. The broadcasters he worked with-National Geographic and Fox-suspended his projects while they investigated the allegations. In 2019 the inquiries were completed, and work resumed on his various shows. Later that year the American Museum of Natural History announced that it had finished its investigation into the claims and that Tyson would continue to serve as director of the Hayden Planetarium.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson | Biography, Books, TV Shows, & Facts

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Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astronomer who popularized science with his books and frequent appearances on radio and television. He hosted such TV series as Origins and NOVA scienceNOW as well as the radio show StarTalk. His books included The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet.

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The Honorable France A. Córdova is an astrophysicist and the 14th director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Córdova was nominated to this position by the President of the United States in 2013 and subsequently confirmed by the U.S. Senate. NSF is a $8.1B independent federal agency; it is the only government agency charged with advancing all fields of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and STEM education.

Córdova has been a leader in science, engineering and education for more than three decades. She has a distinguished career in both higher education and government; her contributions in multi-spectrum research on x-ray and gamma ray sources and space-borne instrumentation have made her an internationally recognized astrophysicist.

She is president emerita of Purdue University, where she led the university to record levels of research funding, reputational rankings, and student retention and graduation rates. She focused her tenure on launching tomorrow's leaders, translating research to innovation and meeting global challenges. She established a new College of Health and Human Sciences at Purdue, as well as a new Global Research Policy Institute, and participated in state-wide initiatives to boost public-private research collaborations.

Córdova is also chancellor emerita of the University of California, Riverside, where she was a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy and laid the foundation for a new medical school, California's first public medical school in over 40 years, and focused on student diversity and inclusion. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, where Córdova was vice chancellor for research and professor of physics, she led a campus-wide effort to support convergence in blue-sky research areas.

Previously, Córdova served as NASA's chief scientist, representing NASA to the larger scientific community and infusing the activities of the agency -- including the International Space Station, then under construction -- with the scientific goals of the broader community. She was the youngest person and first woman to serve as NASA's chief scientist and was awarded the agency's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Medal.

Prior to joining NASA, she was on the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University where she headed the department of astronomy and astrophysics. Córdova was also deputy group leader in the Earth and space sciences division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University and her doctorate in physics from the California Institute of Technology.

More recently, Córdova served as chair of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution and on the board of trustees of Mayo Clinic. She also served as a member of the National Science Board (NSB), where she chaired the Committee on Strategy and Budget. As NSF director, she is an ex officio member of the NSB.

Córdova's scientific contributions have been in the areas of observational and experimental astrophysics, multi-spectral research on x-ray and gamma ray sources and space-borne instrumentation. She has published more than 150 scientific papers. She was co-principal investigator for a telescope experiment that is currently flying on the satellite XMM-Newton, a cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency.

For her scientific contributions, Córdova has been awarded several honorary doctorates, including ones from Purdue, Duke and Dartmouth Universities. She was honored as a Kilby Laureate, recognized for "significant contributions to society through science, technology, innovation, invention and education." Córdova was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a National Associate of the National Academies. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for Women in Science (AWIS).

Córdova is married to Christian J. Foster, a science educator, and they have two adult children.

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The Honorable France A. Córdova is an astrophysicist and the 14th director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Córdova was nominated to this position by the President of the United States in 2013 and subsequently confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

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Ten Black Scientists that Science Teachers Should Know About | PBS Education

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Your source for teaching inspiration, blogs, and online professional events.

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Over the centuries, many remarkable scientists have emerged from Spanish-speaking lands, cultures and ancestors. Though grouping such a diverse collection of people under a single rubric -- particularly the politically expedient but dubious term Hispanic - isn't ideal, it does make room to explore their wide-ranging array of backgrounds and accomplishments.

Take these two eminent medical men both born in Caracas, Venezuela, whom you'll meet in a little bit. The first, a child of Spanish immigrants, spent his life in his homeland and dedicated himself to the treatment of leprosy there; the second, born of Spanish Moroccan and French Moroccan parents, spent his formative years in Paris and most of his life in America, and studied the genetic causes of autoimmune diseases. Similar, yet worlds apart; that's this list in a nutshell.

Before Google doodles, we honored important forgotten figures with postage stamps. Carlos Juan Finlay, the Cuban physician who first linked yellow fever to mosquitoes in 1881, has received both tributes. Given the thousands of lives he saved and the decades of scorn he endured, we'd say he deserved them.

Born in Puerto Príncipe, Cuba, Finlay studied abroad before returning to Havana as a general practitioner and ophthalmologist with a penchant for scientific research. At the time, yellow fever still ravaged the tropics, terrorizing populations and disrupting shipping, especially in Havana [sources: Frierson; Haas; PBS; WHO; UVHSL].

Finlay noticed that yellow fever epidemics roughly coincided with Havana's mosquito season, but his mosquito-transmission hypothesis was met with disdain for decades until he convinced American military surgeon Walter Reed (like the hospital) to look into it. Reed and his colleagues, who had been dispatched to Cuba to fight the disease that had killed so many soldiers during the Spanish-American War, helped Finlay improve his experiments and verified that the species now known as Aedes aegypti was indeed the culprit. Yellow fever was wiped out of Cuba as well as Panama, enabling engineers to finally complete the Panama Canal [sources: Haas; PBS; UVHSL].

Today, yellow fever afflicts roughly 200,000 and kills 30,000 people annually, mostly in African areas lacking vaccines. Symptom reduction remains the only treatment; untreated, the disease has a 50 percent mortality rate. Occurrences of yellow fever have ramped up in recent years [sources: WHO].

We're all painfully aware of how growth, sexual maturity and metabolism kick into overdrive during puberty, but we're usually too distracted to consider the tiny bean-shaped gland with its foot on the throttle. Bernardo Alberto Houssay was barely out of puberty himself when he began researching the pituitary gland, but then he was always a bit of a prodigy: The intelligence that helped him stand out from his seven siblings had previously earned him a spot in pharmacy school at age 14.

Houssay's research into the relationship between sugar metabolism and a pituitary hormone earned him the 1947 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and, more importantly, marked a turning point in diabetes management. He shared the prize with Carl Cori and Gerty Cori (née Radnitz), pioneers in understanding the catalytic conversion of glycogen [sources: Magill; Nobel Prize; USASEF].

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Houssay performed research in circulation, respiration, immunity, the nervous system, digestion and the treatment of insect and snake bites. Although he was among the 150 educators sacked during Gen. Juan Perón's 1943 military coup, he became one of the most influential physician-scientists of 20th-century Latin America. His impact was felt through his extensive papers, his widely published textbook, "Human Physiology," and his organization of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Buenos Aires, which produced such medical luminaries as Luis Leloir and César Milstein, both on this list [sources: Magill; Houssay; USASEF].

The man credited with one of the most important Mesoamerican discoveries in history started out lecturing on legal philosophy. After discovering a love of ancient regional architecture and writing systems, the Mexico City native began taking classes in anthropology. In 1925, Alfonso Caso y Andrade added an M.A. in the subject to his philosophy master's degree and law degree, all from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) [sources: Anthropology News; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Gaillard; Smithsonian].

Caso's exploration of early Oaxacan cultures led him to the monumental discovery and excavation of Tomb Seven at Monte Albán. By studying burial offerings there, he proved that the Mixtec people succeeded the Zapotec as masters of the city. His finding further enabled him to define five major phases of the ancient capital's history, beginning in the 8th century B.C.E., that lined up with the history of other sites. These endeavors, combined with his contributions to cracking the Mixtec Codices, marked his best-known accomplishments in anthropology [sources: Anthropology News; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Gaillard; Smithsonian].

But Caso's influence extended far beyond the sciences. He was also a teacher, attorney, administrator, archaeologist and advocate for Mexico's American Indians. He also served as rector of UNAM and director of the National Museum and of the National Institute of Anthropology and History [sources: Anthropology News; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Gaillard; Smithsonian].

Much as fad diets might tell us to cut them out, energy-packed carbohydrates are essential to most life, thanks to two opposing chemical processes: combustion, which allows us to break down carbs and release energy needed for vital bodily processes, and synthesis, which enables us to use various sugars to build substances we need to live.

Before Argentine physician and biochemist Luis Federico Leloir did his groundbreaking research into the transformation of one sugar into another, combustion was well-understood, but synthesis remained a mysterious, largely guessed-at phenomenon. By isolating a new class of substances called sugar nucleotides, Leloir found the key to deciphering this voluminous backlog of unsolved metabolic reactions. A new field of biochemistry opened up virtually overnight, and Leloir received the 1970 Nobel Prize in chemistry [sources: Myrbäck; Parodi].

Leloir was born in Paris to Argentine parents and lived in Buenos Aires from the age of 2, with the exception of a few years spent abroad. After earning his medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires, he worked at the Institute of Physiology with Bernardo Houssay. In 1947, he established the Institute for Biochemical Research, Buenos Aires, where he began the lactose, or milk sugar, research that would lead to his great breakthrough [sources: Leloir; May].

A quick glance at Luis Alvarez's array of research and engineering projects reveals why colleagues described him as the "prize wild idea man." A sample: He built U.S. President Eisenhower an indoor golf-training machine, analyzed the Zapruder film and tried to locate an Egyptian pyramid's treasure chamber using cosmic rays [sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica; PBS; Sullivan; Wohl].

In 1938, Alvarez identified orbital-electron capture, radioactive decay in which a nucleus absorbs an orbital electron. The following year, he and Felix Bloch pioneered measuring a neutron's magnetic moment, that is, its tendency to align with an applied magnetic field (an important clue that the neutrally charged particle is made of electrically charged fundamental particles). During World War II, he invented several radar applications, worked on the Manhattan Project and rode in a chase plane during the Enola Gay's Hiroshima bombing. After the war, he worked on the first proton linear accelerator and was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize in physics for his work with elementary particles [sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica; PBS; Sullivan; Wohl].

Physicists had already constructed cloud chambers and bubble chambers, which spotted speeding, charged particles via condensing vapor or boiling liquid. But tiny resonance particles, which existed for a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, were only detectable by the traces they left behind -- disintegration products and collision reactions with other particles. To tackle the task, Alvarez developed his own bubble chamber, camera stabilizers and a computerized system for analyzing bubble photographs. Together with the linear accelerators that he helped pioneer, these revolutionized the discovery of elemental particles, which he and his team discovered by the truckload [sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica; Nobel Prize; PBS; Sullivan; Wohl].

The world will forever associate two names with leprosy, aka Hansen's disease: Norwegian physician Gerhard Hansen, who in 1873 discovered the bacterium that causes it; and Jacinto Convit, who created a new vaccine for the slow-acting, disfiguring and deadly disease by combining a known tuberculosis treatment with an armadillo bacterium in 1987 [sources: BBC; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Chinea; Yandell].

But Convit, who was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and died there a century later, extended his hand beyond the confines of the lab or doctor's office. Moved after encountering the disease's poor and stigmatized victims during medical school, he soon dedicated himself to helping treat them and to combating the social stigma under which they lived [sources: BBC; Chinea].

Convit's vaccines for leprosy and leishmaniasis are no longer in use, and the search continues for universally effective and acceptable vaccines for both diseases.

We like to view ourselves as special snowflakes, as one-of-a-kind as our fingerprints. In a way, we are: The surfaces of our cells teem with a unique array of antigens that identify us and prevent our own immune systems, under normal circumstances, from attacking those cells. Ascertaining the genetic basis of this major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, earned Baruj Benacerraf the 1980 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and advanced our understanding of immune response and autoimmune diseases (such as multiple sclerosis) by leaps and bounds. He shared the award with George D. Snell, who uncovered the initial evidence for the MHC in the 1940s in mice, and Jean Dausset, the first to find a human compatibility antigen [sources: Benacerraf; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Nobel Prize].

Speaking of the immune system, when using antibodies to combat viruses or bacteria, the human immune system favors an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. Unfortunately, the resulting soup of B cells and immunoglobulin is unsuited to targeted research. When César Milstein produced the first monoclonal antibodies in 1975, he not only solved this problem, he became one of the fathers of modern medicine.

At the time, researchers were struggling to create targeted pure antibodies that worked against known agents. Certain mouse spleen cells offered hope, but the specific antibodies they produced died too quickly to be useful. By combining these cells with immortal myeloma cells, Milstein and postdoc Georges Köhler produced large amounts of long-lived, identical (monoclonal) antibodies. For his work, Milstein shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Köhler and Niels K. Jerne [sources: Nobel Prize].

The late 20th century was marked by the recognition that humans could significantly affect the environment, even Earth itself. But, beyond localized ecological concerns over DDT and the vaguer terror of nuclear winter, by the early 1970s we hadn't much considered the potentially global consequences of industry and chemistry. This was especially true in the case of the chemically inert chains of chlorine and fluorine atoms strapped to a carbon backbone known as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.

As a child in Mexico City, Molina admired his aunt, a chemist, and emulated her by converting a spare bathroom into a makeshift chemistry lab. He studied in Mexico and abroad, and made his groundbreaking discovery concerning CFCs during his postdoctoral stint with Rowland at University of California, Irvine. The work earned him the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry, an honor he shared with Rowland and Paul J. Crutzen, a pioneer in studying nitrogen oxide effects on ozone destruction [sources: Crutzen; Nobel Prize; Nobel Prize]. He died in 2020.

Our final entry jointly honors two pioneers of space: physicist Franklin Chang-Díaz, the first Hispanic-American astronaut, and engineer Ellen Ochoa, the first female Hispanic-American astronaut (see her picture on the first page).

Ellen Ochoa was born in Los Angeles, Calif., and earned her master's degree and doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Ochoa researched information processing at Sandia National Laboratories and NASA Ames Research Center and listed as co-inventor on three patents in optics, object recognition and image processing. She became an astronaut in 1991 and flew four shuttle missions. In 2012, she was named JSC director -- the first Hispanic person and second woman to do so [sources: NASA; NASA].
Note: The first person of Latin American origin in space was Cuba's Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez in 1980, as part of a team from the Soviet Union. Méndez was also the first person of African heritage in space.

Hispanic Scientists FAQ

Who is the most famous Hispanic scientist?

Severo Ochoa, who was born and educated in Spain, is the most famous Hispanic scientist. He's also received a Nobel Prize for his research on bacterial enzyme, which has enabled inventions related to synthesized RNA.

Who was the first Hispanic scientist?

Mario J. Molina was the first Mexican scientist who went on to win the Nobel Prize in the field of chemistry. Molina is credited with discovering the chemical impact of CFCs on the environment.

Who is recognized during Hispanic Heritage Month?

Hispanic Heritage Month celebrates the contributions of people from five Latin American countries, including El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras.

Who is the most famous scientist?

Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton are known as the greatest scientists of all time. Closely following them are Galileo, Pythagoras, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin and Nicola Tesla.

Who invented the term "hispanic"?

The term "hispanic" was created and adopted by the United States government in the early 1970s during the Nixon administration. This happened after years of debates, protests and lobbying by Mexican-American people who had historically been forced to record themselves as "Spanish-speaking", having "Spanish origin" or "white" on the census.

Author's Note: 10 Hispanic Scientists You Should Know

The thing that struck me most while compiling this list was the devastating effect that political forces can have on science. Sure, politicized scientific issues like global climate change might instigate rancorous debate, but this smoke, though toxic in its own way, is nothing compared to the fire under which teachers, intellectuals and scientists have lived during many authoritarian regimes. For as long as there have been empires, juntas and dictators, there have been ideas that are easier to suppress, mock or beat down than to face in open debate.

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He built President Eisenhower an indoor golf-training machine, analyzed the Zapruder film and searched for an Egyptian pyramid's treasure chamber using cosmic rays. Aren't you dying to meet this wide-ranging scientist?

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Nikola Tesla (born July 9/10, 1856, Smiljan, Austrian Empire [now in Croatia]-died January 7, 1943, New York, New York, U.S.) Serbian American inventor and engineer who discovered and patented the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He also developed the three-phase system of electric power transmission. He immigrated to the United States in 1884 and sold the patent rights to his system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors to George Westinghouse. In 1891 he invented the Tesla coil, an induction coil widely used in radio technology.

Tesla was from a family of Serbian origin. His father was an Orthodox priest; his mother was unschooled but highly intelligent. As he matured, he displayed remarkable imagination and creativity as well as a poetic touch.

Training for an engineering career, he attended the Technical University at Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague. At Graz he first saw the Gramme dynamo, which operated as a generator and, when reversed, became an electric motor, and he conceived a way to use alternating current to advantage. Later, at Budapest, he visualized the principle of the rotating magnetic field and developed plans for an induction motor that would become his first step toward the successful utilization of alternating current. In 1882 Tesla went to work in Paris for the Continental Edison Company, and, while on assignment to Strassburg in 1883, he constructed, after work hours, his first induction motor. Tesla sailed for America in 1884, arriving in New York with four cents in his pocket, a few of his own poems, and calculations for a flying machine. He first found employment with Thomas Edison, but the two inventors were far apart in background and methods, and their separation was inevitable.

In May 1888 George Westinghouse, head of the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh, bought the patent rights to Tesla's polyphase system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors. The transaction precipitated a titanic power struggle between Edison's direct-current systems and the Tesla-Westinghouse alternating-current approach, which eventually won out.

Tesla soon established his own laboratory, where his inventive mind could be given free rein. He experimented with shadowgraphs similar to those that later were to be used by Wilhelm Röntgen when he discovered X-rays in 1895. Tesla's countless experiments included work on a carbon button lamp, on the power of electrical resonance, and on various types of lighting.

In order to allay fears of alternating currents, Tesla gave exhibitions in his laboratory in which he lit lamps by allowing electricity to flow through his body. He was often invited to lecture at home and abroad. The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is widely used today in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment. That year also marked the date of Tesla's U.S. citizenship.

Westinghouse used Tesla's alternating current system to light the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. This success was a factor in their winning the contract to install the first power machinery at Niagara Falls, which bore Tesla's name and patent numbers. The project carried power to Buffalo by 1896.

In 1898 Tesla announced his invention of a teleautomatic boat guided by remote control. When skepticism was voiced, Tesla proved his claims for it before a crowd in Madison Square Garden.

In Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he stayed from May 1899 until early 1900, Tesla made what he regarded as his most important discovery-terrestrial stationary waves. By this discovery he proved that Earth could be used as a conductor and made to resonate at a certain electrical frequency. He also lit 200 lamps without wires from a distance of 40 km (25 miles) and created man-made lightning, producing flashes measuring 41 metres (135 feet). At one time he was certain he had received signals from another planet in his Colorado laboratory, a claim that was met with derision in some scientific journals.

Returning to New York in 1900, Tesla began construction on Long Island of a wireless world broadcasting tower, with $150,000 capital from the American financier J. Pierpont Morgan. Tesla claimed he secured the loan by assigning 51 percent of his patent rights of telephony and telegraphy to Morgan. He expected to provide worldwide communication and to furnish facilities for sending pictures, messages, weather warnings, and stock reports. The project was abandoned because of a financial panic, labour troubles, and Morgan's withdrawal of support. It was Tesla's greatest defeat.

Tesla's work then shifted to turbines and other projects. Because of a lack of funds, his ideas remained in his notebooks, which are still examined by enthusiasts for unexploited clues. In 1915 he was severely disappointed when a report that he and Edison were to share the Nobel Prize proved erroneous. Tesla was the recipient of the Edison Medal in 1917, the highest honour that the American Institute of Electrical Engineers could bestow.

Tesla allowed himself only a few close friends. Among them were the writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain, and Francis Marion Crawford. He was quite impractical in financial matters and an eccentric, driven by compulsions and a progressive germ phobia. But he had a way of intuitively sensing hidden scientific secrets and employing his inventive talent to prove his hypotheses. Tesla was a godsend to reporters who sought sensational copy but a problem to editors who were uncertain how seriously his futuristic prophecies should be regarded. Caustic criticism greeted his speculations concerning communication with other planets, his assertions that he could split the Earth like an apple, and his claim of having invented a death ray capable of destroying 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 400 km (250 miles).

After Tesla's death the custodian of alien property impounded his trunks, which held his papers, his diplomas and other honours, his letters, and his laboratory notes. These were eventually inherited by Tesla's nephew, Sava Kosanovich, and later housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. Hundreds filed into New York City's Cathedral of St. John the Divine for his funeral services, and a flood of messages acknowledged the loss of a great genius. Three Nobel Prize recipients addressed their tribute to "one of the outstanding intellects of the world who paved the way for many of the technological developments of modern times."

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Nikola Tesla | Biography, Facts, & Inventions

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Nikola Tesla, the brilliant Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer, revolutionized technology with his groundbreaking contributions to alternating current (AC) power systems and numerous other inventions that shaped the modern world.

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Alexander Graham Bell | Biography, Education, Telephone, Inventions, & Facts

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Alexander Graham Bell, (born March 3, 1847, Edinburgh, Scotland—died August 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada), Scottish-born American inventor, scientist, and teacher of the deaf whose foremost accomplishments were the invention of the telephone (1876) and the refinem…

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Saturday we celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, and while this has been a remarkable year for recognition of women in science (hello, " Hidden Figures ") there are still hundreds of relatively-unknown women who have changed the world with their research throughout history.

Amid a global push to get more girls interested in science, engineering, technology, and math, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate those who already are STEM superstars of the past and present.
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Take a look at 17 of the best female scientists up to (and including) 2017. And let's hope these ladies don't remain hidden too much longer.

1. Tiera Guinn

This 21-year-old scientist hasn't yet graduated from college, but Tiera Guinn's already doing literal rocket science. The MIT senior is helping build a rocket for NASA that could be one of the biggest and most powerful ever made, according to WBRC News. She's an aerospace major with a 5.0 GPA who also works as a Rocket Structural Design and Analysis Engineer for the Space Launch System that aerospace company Boeing is building for NASA.

"You have to look forward to your dream and you can't let anybody get in the way of it," she said. "No matter how tough it may be, no matter how many tears you might cry, you have to keep pushing. And you have to understand that nothing comes easy. Keeping your eyes on the prize, you can succeed."

2. Marie Curie

We all know the name of this physicist and chemist, but do you recall Marie Curie's contributions to science? The Polish scientist studied at the Sorbonne, where she became the head of the physics lab there in the early 1900s - when women really did not teach science at European universities - and pioneered research in radioactivity. She and her husband jointly won the Nobel Prize in 1903.

3. Elizabeth Blackwell

Elizabeth Blackwell, who was born in 1821, was the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States (Geneva Medical College in upstate New York), became an activist for poor women's health, and went on to found a medical school for women in England.

4. Jane Goodall

The most famous primate scientist in history, Jane Goodall was renowned for her work with chimpanzees and as a champion of animal rights. And Goodall wasn't just working in a lab; she climbed trees and mimicked the behavior of chimps in Tanzania to gain their trust and study them in their natural habitat.

5. Mae C. Jemison

Mae C. Jemison is the first African-American female astronaut. In 1992, she became the first black woman in space when as a crew member on the space ship Endeavour. Before entering the space program, she was a medical doctor who served with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

6. Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Doudna is one of the most culturally significant scientists studying today. She helped developed CRISPR, the genetic-engineering method that could allow for "designer babies" but also for the eradication or treatment of sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, and HIV. She is a professor at UC Berkeley.

7. Katherine Freese

Freese is a trailblazing modern scientist who studies dark matter, including studying "dark stars" in the universe, something that has never been observed directly by a human. She's the Director of Nordita, an institute for theoretical physics in Stockholm.

8. Rachel Carson

In the 1960s, one environmental scientist's voice rose above the rest to become central to American politics, culture, and foreign policy: Rachel Carson's. Her book, "Silent Spring," warned of the dangers of pesticides and chemicals to humans, plants, and animals, and was a landmark in the nation's environmental history.

9. Maria Goeppert Mayer

A German immigrant to the US who studied at Johns Hopkins during the Great Depression, Maria Goeppert Mayer, born in 1906, persisted in her studies even when no university would employ her and went onto become a chemical physicist. Her most famous contribution to modern physics is discovering the nuclear shell of the atomic nucleus, for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1963.

10. Sara Seager

By the time women were being trained as university scientists, the "solar system" had been pretty well-mapped. But Sara Seager, born in 1971, has discovered 715 planets in her time working with the Kepler Space Telescope, a remarkable contributor to the modern understanding of space.

11. Jane Cooke Wright

One of the first female African American doctors, Jane Cooke Wright, born in 1919, was a trailblazing cancer researcher who worked closely with her father at Harvard, where she began testing individualized chemotherapy treatments for cancer patients.

12. Vera Rubin

Vera Rubin, who was born in 1928, proved that dark matter existed in the universe by concluding that invisible gravity sources were pulling planets and stars in certain directions. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1993 by President Clinton. In its obituary for Rubin, who died Dec. 25, 2016, the New York Times wrote, "Dr. Rubin, cheerful and plain-spoken, had a lifelong love of the stars, championed women in science and was blunt about the limits of humankind's vaunted knowledge of nature."

13. Sau Lan Wu

Hong Kong scientist Sau Lan Wu is a particle physicist who warmed up her theatrical career by discovering charm quarks and gluons, and then really changed the entire course of scientific history by helping to discover the Higgs boson particle, which is still the subject of cutting-edge science today.

14. Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin, born in 1920, was a British biophysicist known for revolutionary work discovering DNA, as well as understanding X-rays and molecular structure.

15. Barbara McClintock

Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her studies of the genetic makeup of corn, and specifically, her discovery of genetic transposition, or the ability of genes to change position on the chromosome.

16. Rita Levi-Montalcini

The Italian neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini won a Nobel in 1986 for discovering what is known as Nerve growth factor. According to the New York Times, her work on nerve growth led to discoveries on how that growth can go wrong in diseases like dementia and cancer.

17. Gertrude Elion

Another Nobel winner, Gertrude Elion, born in 1918, was a biochemist and pharmacologist who developed drugs to treat leukemia and prevent kidney transplant rejection.

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17 Famous Female Scientists Who Helped Change the World

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These STEM superstars literally changed everything.