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Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson—who worked as "human computers" at NASA during the 1960s Space Race.

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Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson—who worked as "human computers" at NASA during the 1960s Space Race.

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They are basically superwomen. (^-^)

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Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut. She became the first African-American woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992. Jemison joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1987 and was selected to serve for the STS-47 mission, during which the Endeavour orbited the Earth for nearly eight days on September 12–20, 1992.

Born in Alabama and raised in Chicago, Jemison graduated from Stanford University with degrees in chemical engineering as well as African and African-American studies. She then earned her medical degree from Cornell University. Jemison was a doctor for the Peace Corps in Liberia and Sierra Leone from 1983 until 1985 and worked as a general practitioner. In pursuit of becoming an astronaut, she applied to NASA.

Jemison left NASA in 1993 and founded a technology research company. She later formed a non-profit educational foundation and through the foundation is the principal of the 100 Year Starship project funded by DARPA. Jemison also wrote several books for children and appeared on television several times, including in a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She holds several honorary doctorates and has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame.

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St. Elmo Brady was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry. Equally as significant, Brady went on to build chemistry curricula, faculty, programs and facilities at four major historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), where he and his colleagues mentored multiple generations of African- American chemists. His life was truly an inspiration to all who had the privilege to meet him, and his legacy lives on. For his life-long accomplishments, Brady is being honored by the American Chemical Society with a National Historic Chemical Landmark. The Landmark is being designated and celebrated at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, where he received his Ph.D. in 1916, and at the four HBCUs where he served in leadership positions: Tuskegee University, Howard University, Fisk University and Tougaloo College.

Brady was born on Dec. 22, 1884, in Louisville, Kentucky, the eldest of three children of Thomas Alexander Brady and Celester (Parker) Brady. He graduated from Louisville Colored High School in 1903 and at the age of 20 left home to attend Fisk, an all-black college in Nashville, Tennessee, founded in 1866. There, his chemistry teacher, Thomas W. Talley, encouraged him to study chemistry.

Brady graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1908 and took a teaching position at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. After four years teaching at Tuskegee, Brady was offered a scholarship to study at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. He took a leave of absence from Tuskegee and began at Illinois in the summer session of 1913. He completed his M.S. in chemistry in 1914 and continued his graduate studies under Professor Clarence G. Derick.

Brady published three scholarly abstracts with Derick in Science between 1914 and 1915 and also collaborated with Professor George Beal on a paper titled “The Hydrochloride Method for the Determination of Alkaloids,” published in the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry.

Brady’s main focus for his Ph.D. research was settling a scientific disagreement between his advisor and the eminent Harvard chemist Arthur Michael. Derick and Michael disagreed on how the acidity of carboxylic acids was affected by replacing hydrogen atoms on the carbon chain with other chemical groups. In his Ph.D. research, Brady investigated the acidity of straight- chain carboxylic acids in which a pair of hydrogen atoms was replaced with an oxygen atom to give a keto acid.

Brady’s research resulted in a number of firsts, including new methods for preparing and purifying certain compounds and clarifying the influence of carbonyl groups on the acidity of carboxylic acids, an early contribution to the nascent field of physical organic chemistry. Brady’s studies supported Derick’s view, and he and others concluded that Michael’s view was incorrect.

Brady completed his Ph.D. after only two years, giving an oral defense of his 228-page dissertation, titled “The Scale of Influence of Substituents in Paraffine Monobasic Acids. The Divalent Oxygen Atom,” on May 22, 1916. He was the 40th person to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois, which granted its first chemistry doctorate in 1903, and the first African-American chemist to earn that distinction in the U.S.

Brady was well aware of the challenges he overcame and his role in breaking down barriers. He lived in a segregated community, where finding housing was among the many challenges he faced. Yet he didn’t talk about any of the difficulties, said his granddaughter, Carol Brady Fonvielle, in an interview. Her grandfather had a good sense of humor and cared for all people, she said. “My grandparents used to speak in terms of being good for the race.”

Notably, while at the University of Illinois, Brady became in 1914 the first African-American admitted to Phi Lambda Upsilon, the chemistry honor society, and in 1915 was one of the first African-Americans to be inducted into Sigma Xi, the science honor society. In November 1916, The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, selected Brady for its biographical sketch as “Man of the Month.”

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Shirley Ann Jackson was the first Black woman to earn a PhD from MIT, where she studied nuclear physics. She is currently the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the oldest technological research university in the United States. She has been a trailblazer throughout her career, including becoming the first African-American woman to lead a top-ranked research university. Learn more about physics:

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Beebe Steven Lynk was one of the first African American women to earn a doctorate in pharmaceutical chemistry and teach in a medical school in the United States.
She served as the professor of medical Latin botany and materia medica at the University of West Tennessee. She was an active member of the early black women's club movement, authoring a book, Advice to Colored Women in 1896.

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Guion S. Bluford, Jr. is an astronaut who was the first African American launched into space. Bluford received an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 1964 and was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, where he trained as a fighter pilot.

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Mary Jackson was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer who in 1958 became the first African American female engineer to work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Much of her work centred on the airflow around aircraft. Discover more about engineering here:

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Mae C. Jemison is an American astronaut and physician who, on June 4, 1987, became the first African American woman to be admitted into NASA’s astronaut training program. On September 12, 1992, Jemison finally flew into space with six other astronauts aboard the Endeavour on mission STS47, becoming the first African American woman in space. In recognition of her accomplishments, Jemison has received several awards and honorary doctorates. Discover space with your students here: (Also one of my favs not sure why tho but yea)

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Born: April 16, 1921, Corona, New York, NY
Died: October 28, 2003, New York, NY

Marie Maynard Daly was an American biochemist. She was the first African-American woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry.

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Benjamin Banneker was born on November 9, 1731 in Baltimore County, Maryland. His parents are Mary Banneky, a free black, and Robert, a freed slave from Guinea.[2][3][4]

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Neil deGrasse Tyson (/ˈdəˈɡræs/; born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. He is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.

Tyson was born in the borough Manhattan of New York City, New York. He graduated from The Bronx High School of Science.[1] He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics from Harvard University.[1] He earned his doctorate degree in Astrophysics from Columbia University.[1] He lives in Lower Manhattan with his wife and two children.[2]

In December 2018, Tyson was accused on sexual misconduct by many female former students.[3] He said that the allegations were not true, but Fox and National Geographic announced that they would launch an investigation into the matter.[4]

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George Washington Carver (1864 – January 5, 1943) was an American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. He was the most prominent black scientist of the early 20th century.

While a professor at Tuskegee Institute, Carver developed techniques to improve soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton. He wanted poor farmers to grow other crops, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, as a source of their own food and to improve their quality of life. The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes using peanuts. Although he spent years developing and promoting numerous products made from peanuts, none became commercially successful.

Apart from his work to improve the lives of farmers, Carver was also a leader in promoting environmentalism. He received numerous honors for his work, including the Spingarn Medal of the NAACP. In an era of high racial polarization, his fame reached beyond the black community. He was widely recognized and praised in the white community for his many achievements and talents. In 1941, Time magazine dubbed Carver a "Black Leonardo".

Color film of Carver shot in 1937 at the Tuskegee Institute by African American surgeon Allen Alexander was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019. The 12 minutes of footage includes Carver in his apartment, office and laboratory, as well as images of him tending flowers and displaying his paintings. The film was digitized by The National Archives as part of its multi-year effort to preserve and make available the historically significant film collections of the National Park Service.

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Bettye Washington was born in Fort Worth, Texas.[3] She attended segregated public schools and graduated from I.M. Terrell High School around 1952.

She entered Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, graduating with a B.S. in chemistry in 1955. Following her marriage to Veteran Air force Captain William Miller Greene in 1955, she attended Wayne State University in Detroit, where she earned her Ph.D. in physical chemistry working with Wilfred Heller(1962).[4] She also taught undergraduate chemistry at this time.[5] Her doctoral dissertation, "Determination of particle size distributions in emulsions by light scattering" was published in 1965.[6]

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research advanced our understanding of the skin cells that produce melanin and how those cells become cancerous, but she has also led the way for equal access to education and professional opportunities for women and minorities. Despite personal challenges stemming from racism and sexism, she was committed to using her success to encourage women and minorities to enter the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering.Cobb’s family was steeped in the medical profession. Her grandfather, a freed slave, had graduated from Howard College in 1898 with a degree in pharmacy and her father was a physician. The third generation of medical professionals, Cobb was born in Chicago, the daughter of Frank Plummer and Carriebel Cole Plummer, a schoolteacher. Though forced by segregation to attend less academically rigorous public schools, Cobb determined early on that she would not be deterred. She became interested in biology when she first examined cells through a microscope in high school.Cobb first attended the University of Michigan, but left the school because of its lingering culture of discrimination, ultimately earning her B.A. in Biology from traditionally black Talladega College in Alabama. She then applied for a teaching fellowship at New York University but was rejected because of her race. She personally visited the school to present her credentials and was ultimately accepted to the position. She began teaching at NYU in 1945 and received her M.S. in cell physiology in 1947 and Ph.D. in 1950.Upon her graduation, Cobb began working in the field of cancer research, becoming a fellow at the National Cancer Institute. From 1952 to 1954, she directed the Tissue Culture Laboratory at the University of Illinois, then went on to teach and conduct research at New York University, Hunter College, and Sarah Lawrence College. Cobb began researching the effects of chemotherapy drugs on human cells infected with cancer. Primarily concerned with melanoma, a type of skin cancer, her research included skin pigment cells and focused specifically on melanin, which gives skin its pigmentation. Her findings continue to be useful to scientists as they work to create new and more effective cancer fighting tools.In 1967, she came to Connecticut where she was appointed Dean and Professor of Zoology at Connecticut College in New London. Along with her continued research, she also began to institute and fund model programs to encourage and retain women and under-represented minorities who sought to enter traditionally white male-dominated fields. When she left Connecticut College in 1975 to become Dean at Douglass College, the women’s division within Rutgers University, she continued her work to improve the access of women and minorities to science and mathematics fields. Though the college already had a strong presence of women mathematicians and chemistry professors, Cobb worked to attract more women to the sciences with new programs. In 1979, she published “Filters for Women in Science,” an article in which she exposed how educational systems and other “filters” discouraged women from careers in science and math, which ultimately affected their university tenure and equal pay.Cobb was appointed President of California State University at Fullerton in 1981. During her tenure at CSUF she obtained state funds to construct new science and engineering buildings and found funding to build the university’s first apartment complex, thus ending Fullerton’s status as a commuter college. Perhaps even more importantly, Cobb developed a president’s opportunity program for minority students and set up faculty teams to tutor students in mathematics in an attempt to boost their achievement in college courses.Cobb retired from Fullerton in 1991. In addition to serving on many boards of trustees, she is the recipient of more than twenty honorary degrees. In 1993 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Science. The Center for Excellence selected her to receive the Achievement in Excellence Award in 1999 and, in 2001, she was the first recipient of the Reginald Wilson Award for significant and noteworthy accomplishments in the area of diversity in higher education.Throughout her career, Jewel Plummer Cobb worked tirelessly to promote opportunities for young women and minorities to enter the sciences and other traditionally white male-dominated fields. When public funds ran dry, she turned to private sources and never veered from her belief that education was the key to a life of success and Independence (Wikipida)

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Edward Alexander Bouchet (September 15, 1852 – October 28, 1918) was an American physicist and educator and was the first African American to earn a Ph.D.

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McNair was born October 21, 1950, in Lake City, South Carolina, to Pearl M. and Carl C. McNair. He had two brothers, Carl and Eric A. McNair. In the summer of 1959, he refused to leave the segregated Lake City Public Library without being allowed to check out his books. After the police and his mother were called, he was allowed to borrow books from the library; the building that housed the library at the time is now named after him.[1] A children's book, Ron's Big Mission, offers a fictionalized account of this event. His brother, Carl also wrote the official biography, In the Spirit of Ronald E. McNair—Astronaut: An American Hero.

McNair graduated as valedictorian of Carver High School in 1967.[2]

In 1971, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering physics, magna 🤬 laude, from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, North Carolina.[3]

In 1976, he received a Ph.D. degree in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Michael Feld, becoming nationally recognised for his work in the field of laser physics. Also in 1976, he won the AAU Karate gold medal. He would subsequently win 5 regional championships and earn a 5th degree black belt in karate.[4]

After graduation from MIT (receiving four honorary doctorates, as well as a score of fellowships and commendations), he became a staff physicist at the Hughes Research Lab in Malibu, California.

McNair was a member of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity[3] and a member of the Bahá'í Faith.[5]

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James Ellis LuValle was an American athlete and scientist. He won the bronze medal in the 400 metres at the 1936 Summer Olympics, and was an accomplished chemist and founder of the Graduate Students Association at the University of California, Los Angeles. Born: November 10, 1912, San Antonio, TX. Died: January 30, 1993, Te Anau, New Zealand. Height: 6′ 1″. Education: California Institute of Technology. Medal: Athletics at the 1936 Summer Olympics – Men's 400 metres.

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Valerie L. Thomas (born February 8, 1943) is an American scientist and inventor. She invented the illusion transmitter, for which she received a patent in 1980. She was responsible for developing the digital media formats image processing systems used in the early years of the Landsat program.

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In early 2017, the truth about Blacks in space travel was uncovered in the film, Hidden Figures, where it exposed the truth that Black Women had been instrumental in calculating the trajectory needed to put the first man on the moon. The movie highlighted three women, but as more history comes out, there were more women who were instrumental in NASA's growth and dominance in space travel. One of those women is Valerie Thomas.

Thomas was interested in science as a child, after observing her father tinkering with the television and seeing the mechanical parts inside the TV. At the age of eight, she read The Boys First Book on Electronics, which sparked her interest in a career in science.

Her father would not help her with the projects in the book, despite his own interest in electronics. At the all-girls school she attended, she was not encouraged to pursue science and math courses, though she did manage to take a physics course.

Valerie Thomas would go on to attend Morgan State University, where she was one of two women majoring in physics. Thomas excelled in her math and science courses at Morgan State University and went on to work for NASA after graduation.

In 1964, Valerie Thomas began working for NASA as a data analyst. She developed real-time computer data systems to support satellite operations control centers (1964-1970) and oversaw the creation of the Landsat program (1970-1981), becoming an international expert in Landsat data products.

In 1974, Valerie headed a team of approximately 50 people for the Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment (LACIE), a joint effort with NASA's Johnson Space Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

LACIE demonstrated the feasibility of using space technology to automate the process of predicting wheat yield on a worldwide basis.

In 1976, she attended an exhibition that included an illusion of a light bulb that was lit, even though it had been removed from its socket. The illusion, which involved another light bulb and concave mirrors, inspired Thomas.

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Inventor Valerie Thomas: Bringing Life To 3-D | BlackDoctor.org

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In early 2017, the truth about Blacks in space travel was uncovered in the film, Hidden Figures, where it exposed the truth that Black Women had been instrumental in calculating the trajectory needed to put the first man on the moon.

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he found the ATP fluorescent assay

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A steroid chemist and an entrepreneur, Percy Julian ingeniously figured out how to synthesize important medicinal compounds from abundant plant sources, making them more affordable to mass-produce.

In the 1930s chemists recognized the structural similarity of a large group of natural substances-the steroids. These include the sex hormones and the cortical hormones of the adrenal glands. The medicinal potential of these compounds was clear, but extracting sufficient quantities of them from animal tissue and fluids was prohibitively expensive. As with other scarce or difficult-to-isolate natural products, chemists were called upon to mimic nature by creating these steroids in the lab and later by modifying them to make them safer and more effective as drugs. Chemists found their starting materials in certain plant substances that were also steroids. Percy Lavon Julian (1899-1975) was among the many scientists, including Russell Earl Marker, Carl Djerassi, and George Rosenkranz, who participated actively in the synthesis and large-scale production of steroids from plant compounds.

Education and Early Career

Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of a railway mail clerk and the grandson of enslaved people. In an era when African Americans faced prejudice in virtually all aspects of life, not least in the scientific world, he succeeded against the odds. Inadequately prepared by his high school, he was accepted at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, as a sub-freshman, meaning that he had to take high-school courses concurrently with his freshman courses. Majoring in chemistry, he graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1920. After graduation he taught chemistry at Fisk University for two years before winning an Austin Fellowship to Harvard University, where he completed a master's degree in organic chemistry. After Harvard he returned to teaching at West Virginia State College and Howard University.

Physostigmine for Glaucoma

In 1929 Julian traveled to the University of Vienna, Austria, to begin doctoral studies on the chemistry of medicinal plants. Two years later, with degree in hand, he and a Viennese colleague, Josef Pikl, took positions back in the United States at Howard and two years later moved to DePauw. There they accomplished the first total synthesis of physostigmine, the active principle of the Calabar bean, used since the end of the 19th century to treat glaucoma. Physostigmine, an alkaloid, eases the constriction of outflow channels from the eye's aqueous humor to relieve high pressure there, which, if left untreated, damages the retina and eventually causes blindness.

Steroids from Soybeans: Progesterone

Meanwhile researchers in many countries were seeking innovative and cost-effective ways to synthesize steroids, including cortisone and the sex hormones. German chemists discovered that the steroid stigmasterol, which Julian had obtained as a by-product of the physostigmine synthesis but was also obtainable from soybeans, could be used in the synthesis of certain sex hormones, including progesterone, a female sex hormone that was important in helping pregnant women avoid miscarriages. In pursuit of this lead, in 1936 Julian wrote to the Glidden Company in Chicago, requesting samples of their soybean oil. Through a series of events he wound up being hired by Glidden instead, as their director of research in the Soya Division, where he set about figuring out ways to make new products from soybeans.

Three years after arriving at Glidden, Julian learned from plant workers that water had leaked into a tank of purified soybean oil and formed a solid white mass. Immediately identifying the substance as stigmasterol, he realized he had stumbled upon a method for producing large amounts of the steroid from soybeans. Though scientists already knew how to synthesize progesterone from stigmasterol, they didn't have a method for doing it on a massive scale. Now with large quantities of stigmasterol at hand, he was able to develop an innovative industrial process for converting it to progesterone in bulk, producing five to six pounds of progesterone per day (worth thousands of dollars in those days). Soon other sex hormones were in production.

Cortisone and Hydrocortisone

In 1948 scientists at the Mayo Clinic announced their landmark discovery of cortisone, which had remarkable effects on rheumatoid arthritis, and Julian jumped into the exciting competition to synthesize cortisone inexpensively (see also Carl Djerassi). Cortisone is a cortical hormone of the adrenal gland. In 1949 Julian developed a new synthesis for a related substance (called "Substance S") also present in the adrenal cortex and differing from cortisone by only an oxygen atom. From this substance he was able to synthesize both cortisone and hydrocortisone. Hydrocortisone and its derivatives today are more widely prescribed than cortisone products, and most industrial syntheses still begin along the same route that Julian pioneered.

Later Life

Julian remained at Glidden until 1954, when he founded his own company, Julian Laboratories of Franklin Park, Illinois, and Mexico City (which he eventually sold to Smith, Kline and French). Throughout his life he was socially active in groups seeking to advance conditions for African Americans, helping to found the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of Chicago and serving on the boards of several other organizations and universities.
The information contained in this biography was last updated on October 15, 2020.

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A steroid chemist and an entrepreneur, Percy Julian ingeniously figured out how to synthesize important medicinal compounds from abundant plant sources, making them more affordable to mass-produce. In the 1930s chemists recognized the structural similarity of a large group of natural substances-the steroids. These include the sex hormones and the cortical hormones of the adrenal glands.

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This trailblazing engineer became the first person in history to design a Naval ship using a computer.

Raye Montague, the groundbreaking engineer and ship designer, smashed both gender and racial barriers to revolutionize Naval ship design and become the U.S. Navy's first female program manager of ships. While Montague was the first person to ever design a ship on a computer, her contributions were little known until Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures, which told the story of African American female mathematicians at NASA, generated a new interest in other little-known women who made remarkable contributions with their technical prowess. Montague, who died in late 2018 and whose story has been told in a new picture book, The Girl With A Mind For Math, always credited her mother's insistence on education for giving her the push she needed to reach for her dreams. "You'll have three strikes against you," she remembered her saying. "You're female, you're black and you'll have a Southern segregated school education. But you can be or do anything you want, provided you're educated."

Montague was born on January 21, 1935 in Arkansas, and the gifted girl, who excelled at math and science, set her sights on her future career early: when her grandfather took the 7-year-old Montague to see a captured German submarine during WWII, she was fascinated by how it worked. "I looked through the periscope and saw all these dials and mechanisms. And I said to the guy, 'What do you have to know to do this?'" she recalled later. "He said, 'Oh, you'd have to be an engineer, but you don't have to worry about that.'" For a while, it seemed that he was right: when she graduated high school, she wasn't permitted to study engineering at the University of Arkansas because the engineering program didn't admit black students. Instead, she completed a degree in business and moved to Washington D.C. in 1956 to become a typist for the Navy. She continued to pursue her dream of becoming an engineer by taking night classes in computer programming and engineering.

Montague's job with the Navy seated her next to the department's UNIVAC I computer, where she learned how it worked by watching the male Ivy League graduates running the computer. At first, as she later recounted, Montague wasn't allowed to use the computer "because 'we' weren't supposed to touch that computer right? And because I was from Arkansas." One day when the engineers were all out sick, however, she proved that she was up for the challenge by running the machine by herself. Her boss grudgingly agreed to give her a promotion to work on engineering projects - if she worked the night shift. But there was no public transportation at night, and Montague couldn't drive. So she bought a 1949 Pontiac, taught herself how to drive, and worked nights until she got the promotion. Soon, she was appointed a computer systems analyst, and she continued to excel, despite many obstacles along the way.

The real test of Montague's mettle came in 1971 when she was given the daunting task of figuring out how to design a Naval ship using a computer - her boss didn't mention that his department had been unsuccessfully trying to accomplish this task for years. She ended up having to tear down the Navy's computer and rebuild it but, after months of work, she figured out how to create computer-generated ship designs.

After she proved it was possible, the admiralty asked her to create a rough draft for an actual ship. It normally took two years to produce a design of a ship on paper; they gave her a month and she finished the design in 18 hours and 56 minutes. In honor of her breakthrough in the ship design process, Montague was awarded the Navy's Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1972.

Montague continued to climb the Navy's civilian ladder, becoming the program director for the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Integrated Design, Manufacturing, and Maintenance Program, the division head for the Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) Program, and deputy program manager of the Navy's Information Systems Improvement Program. She eventually earned the civilian equivalent rank of captain.

When Montague retired in 1990, her contributions were largely forgotten, but with the success of Hidden Figures, her name emerged as another example of an African American woman in technology whose work was critical to her country's success. She has since been recognized by the Navy and inducted into the Arkansas Women's Hall of Fame. She used her fame to tell people her story and urge them to persevere in their dreams: "Don't let people control you, you control the situation," Montague said in an interview in 2018. "Change obstacles into challenges. You might have to step back and go a different direction, but you can achieve."

Books About Little-Known Women in Programming & Math

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Raye Montague: The "Hidden Figure" Who Revolutionized Naval Ship Design

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This trailblazing engineer became the first person in history to design a Naval ship using a computer. Raye Montague, the groundbreaking engineer and ship designer, smashed both gender and racial barriers to revolutionize Naval ship design and become the U.S. Navy's first female program manager of ships.

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https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/beth-a-brown-1969-2008/

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I think we all know him so i dont need to say much besides hes a famous scientist.

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Carolyn Parker was the first African-American Woman known to gain postgraduate degree in physics.  - Maya K.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Marian Anderson, (born February 27, 1897, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.-died April 8, 1993, Portland, Oregon), American singer, one of the finest contraltos of her time.

Anderson displayed vocal talent as a child, but her family could not afford to pay for formal training. From the age of six, she was tutored in the choir of the Union Baptist Church, where she sang parts written for bass, alto, tenor, and soprano voices. Members of the congregation raised funds for her to attend a music school for a year. At 19 she became a pupil of Giuseppe Boghetti, who was so impressed by her talent that he gave her free lessons for a year. In 1925 she entered a contest with 300 competitors and won first prize, a recital at Lewisohn Stadium in New York City with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Her appearance in August 1925 was a great success.

Although many concert opportunities were closed to her because of her race, Anderson appeared with the Philadelphia Symphony and toured African American Southern college campuses. She made her European debut in Berlin in 1930 and made highly successful European tours in 1930-32, 1933-34, and 1934-35. Still relatively unknown in the United States, she received scholarships to study abroad and appeared before the monarchs of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and England. Her pure vocal quality, richness of tone, and tremendous range made her, in the opinion of many, the world's greatest contralto.

Anderson's New York concert debut at Town Hall in December 1935 was a personal triumph. She subsequently toured South America and in 1938-39 once again toured Europe. In 1939, however, she attempted to rent concert facilities in Washington, D.C.'s Constitution Hall, owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), and was refused because of her race. This sparked widespread protest from many people, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who, along with many other prominent women, resigned from the DAR. Arrangements were made for Anderson to appear instead at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, and she drew an audience of 75,000. On January 7, 1955, she became the first African American singer to perform as a member of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Before she began to sing her role of Ulrica in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, she was given a standing ovation by the audience.

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In 1957 Anderson's autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning, was published. The same year, she made a 12-nation, 35,000-mile (56,000-km) tour sponsored by the Department of State, the American National Theatre and Academy, and Edward R. Murrow's television series . Her role as a goodwill ambassador for the United States was formalized in September 1958 when she was made a delegate to the United Nations. Anderson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and she was the recipient of numerous honorary degrees. She made farewell tours of the world and the United States in 1964-65. In 1977 her 75th birthday ( see Researcher's Note) was marked by a gala concert at Carnegie Hall. Among her myriad honours and awards were the National Medal of Arts in 1986 and the U.S. music industry's Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991.

John M. Cunningham, Readers Editor.

Learn More in these related Britannica articles:

Un ballo in maschera: Background and context

American contralto Marian Anderson sang the role of Ulrica at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on January 7, 1955, thereby becoming the first African American to appear with the company....

...Revolution (DAR) refused to let Marian Anderson, an African American opera singer, perform in Constitution Hall, Eleanor resigned her membership in the DAR and arranged to hold the concert at the nearby Lincoln Memorial; the event turned into a massive outdoor celebration attended by 75,000 people. On another occasion, when...

Marian Anderson, the famed African American contralto, with the support of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was granted permission by the Department of the Interior to perform at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 after being denied the right to sing at Constitution Hall by the Daughters...

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Marian Anderson, American singer, one of the finest contraltos of her time. Anderson displayed vocal talent as a child, but her family could not afford to pay for formal training.

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Marie Maynard Daly is the first African American woman to receive a doctoral degree

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https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/otis-boykin

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Herman Brenner White, Jr. - submitted by Mrs. Fisher

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Herman Brenner White, Jr. - submitted by Mrs. Fisher

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1948 -

Favorite Color: Blue

Favorite Food: Apple Pie with Ice Cream

Interview Length: 191 minutes

Interview Date(s): November 13, 2006

Interview Location(s): Chicago, Illinois

Abstract

Herman Brenner White, Jr. was born on September 28, 1948 in Tuskegee, Alabama. He and his sister, Zepherine White Finch, were raised in Tuskegee and spent summers with their extended family in nearby rural areas. White's mother, Susie Mae Fort White, was a nursing assistant at John Andrew Hospital run by the Tuskegee Medical Institute. His father, Herman B. White Sr., a religious and disciplined man, served in the military, worked at the Moton Air Fields and at the Tuskegee Veteran's Hospital. All of his grandparents were farmers in Alabama. White and his older sister attended John Adams Elementary School and Washington Public School. White describes growing up in the segregated but intellectually self-sufficient Tuskegee community. His family attended the Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, where he learned responsibility as a junior usher. White attended the Tuskegee Institute High School.

Herman White remembers his childhood. One of his earliest memories is playing in the woods near his house with his dog. He remembers the sights, sounds, and smells of growing up at his grandparents' farm and Christmastime at his house. In school, White was quiet and spent a lot of time studying. He was known for running organizations smoothly, though he never sought out leadership positions. White was the class president, chair of the photography club, and editor of the year book. He was also in the choir, in the science club, a member of the honor society, participated in some dramatic arts, and played football. White had several excellent high school teachers and felt that these teachers taught all the students to be competitive in the newly desegregated world.

Herman White discusses his childhood experiences at church. His family attended Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, a prominent church in the community. The church was the center of the community, and the ministers were the leaders in the community. Some notable members of White's community were Eugene Harrison Sr. and Lucius Amerson. During the Civil Rights Movement, White and his parents decided that finishing high school on time and going to college was more important than losing his senior year of school to participate with the first group of black students to integrate Tuskegee High School. White felt his role in the Civil Rights Movement was being an exceptional student and proving through excellent academic achievement that blacks deserved equal rights and equal access to education.

Herman White recalls enjoying growing up so close to Tuskegee Institute where he was able to talk to the professors about science. He became interested in nuclear engineering at age sixteen. White decided to attend Earlham College where he studied nuclear physics instead. In graduate school at Michigan State University, he studied nuclear physics. Under the mentorship of Dr. Henry Blosser, White worked at the Michigan State's Cyclotron Laboratory and completed his M.S. degree. He then received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship to go Switzerland to study at the CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics. He found a new passion there and shifted his research areas from nuclear and acceleration physics to particle physics. Nuclear physics deals with protons and neutrons whereas particle physics deals with the quarks/partons that make up protons or neutrons.

Herman White describes his particle physics work breaking apart protons and neutrons with high energy beams. High energy beams are necessary to overcome the energy that holds the proton and neutron together. Quarks/partons do not allow themselves to be completely dissociated from the other quarks/partons. Fermilab only conducts high energy particle physics activities and is not a multi-discipline laboratory because it is the highest energy particle accelerator in the world and has been since the summer of 1972. At the CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics, White worked with prominent physicists and Nobel Prize Laureate Murray Gell-Mann. Fermilab was named for Enrico Fermi a tremendous theoretical as well as an experimental physicist. White and Raymond J. Stefanski created a formula to measure how many neutrino particles come from kaons and pions, which are mesons. Mesons are the particles that make up quarks.

Herman White talks about how Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen worked to have the Fermilab located in Illinois. White's first experiment at the Fermilab took ten months and his longest experiment took ten years. White feels his most difficult and successful experiment was on kaons of the tevatron. White is working to obtain public support and funding for an international linear collider. He feels that the public should support this kind of research so we can solve problems now and in the future. White hopes that society will see scientists as heroes just as they see athletes and entertainment stars as heroes. He describes how scientific training could help politicians make better decisions.

Herman White explains that accelerators are located underground to protect nature and the public from radiation that may be caused during experiments. Also, if the experiments are done underground than no radiation from the sun can accidentally affect the experiments. White notes that physics is a popular B.S. degree for African Americans but they typically get their graduate degrees in engineering. This is because there is a better chance of job security as an engineer than as a physicist. White would like to be remembered for being a reasonable person to work with and doing "good" science. White would like his legacy to be that of an innovator, from conducting orchestras to learning neutrino physics to teaching students. He hopes these innovations were important.

Slating of Herman White's interview

Herman White shares his favorites

Herman White talks about his mother's side of the family, part 1

Herman White discusses the Tuskegee Institute as well as Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver

Herman White talks about his perception of Tuskegee, Alabama

Herman White talks about his mother's side of the family, part 2

Herman White discusses his family origins on both sides

Herman White talks about how he takes after his parents

Herman White talks about his aunts and uncles

Herman White talks about his sister, Zepherine White Finch, and her name origin

Herman White describes his earliest memories

Herman White remembers taking piano lessons and his family's appreciation for music

Herman White recalls the sights, sounds, and smells of his childhood

Herman White talks about how he was perceived in school

Herman White shares his early interest in science

Herman White talks about his favorite teachers in high school

Herman White recalls the names of his schools

Herman White talks about growing up in Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church

Herman White talks about the church community and well-known parishioners

Herman White recalls how integration was a dangerous and intense time during high school

Herman White remembers Sammy Younge Jr., the first black college student to be killed during the Civil Rights Movement

Herman White recalls how the Civil Rights Movement affected his college choices

Herman White talks about Earlham College

Herman White talks about his interest in science at age sixteen and choosing Earlham, College

Herman White talks about his interest in physics

Herman White talks about his summer job at Chrysler Corporation and his interests in computer programming and engineering

Herman White talks about how he switched from nuclear physics to particle physics

Herman White describes his mentor, Professor Henry Blosser, at Michigan State University

Herman White talks about Michigan State University president, Dr. Clifton Wharton

Herman White explains his work at the cyclotron lab

Herman White explains the difference between a nuclear physicist and a particle physicist

Herman White discusses atoms and the laws of nuclear and particle physics

Herman White talks about high energy beams and accelerator laboratories

Herman White talks about his first two years working at Fermilab and going for his Ph.D. at Yale University

Herman White talks about his particle physics research at the CERN laboratory

Herman White explains the kaon

Herman White talks about how Fermilab was named

Herman White explains the Stefanski and White model for a neutrino production equation

Herman White shares how he chose Florida State University for his Ph.D.

Herman White talks about Fermilab's Illinois location and his number 711 experiment on constituent scattering

Herman White describes his ten year long experiment

Herman White talks about the kaons of the tevatron experiment and his essay about how the public needs physics

Herman White talks about increasing representation for women and other minorities in physics

Herman White shares his plans for a future neutrino experiment and the international linear collider

Herman White describes how scientific training could be useful for politicians to make more informed decisions

Herman White explains why accelerators are underground for safety and regulation

Herman White talks about employee safety at Fermilab and how his former teachers perceive him

Herman White talks about employee safety at Fermilab

Herman White talks about how he would like to be remembered

Herman White hopes his legacy will be that of an innovator

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Favorite Color: Blue Favorite Food: Apple Pie with Ice Cream Interview Length: 191 minutes Interview Date(s): November 13, 2006 Interview Location(s): Chicago, Illinois Herman Brenner White, Jr. was born on September 28, 1948 in Tuskegee, Alabama. He and his sister, Zepherine White Finch, were raised in Tuskegee and spent summers with their extended family in nearby rural areas.

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Dr. Ngozi Ezike - submitted by Mrs. Fisher

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Dr. Ngozi Ezike - submitted by Mrs. Fisher

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CHICAGO (CBS) - We are certainly living in unprecedented times - as over the past year, we've witnessed immeasurable suffering, from racial injustices as well as from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through it all, Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike has been the calm, yet commanding voice we've needed over the year. Ezike is a Black History maker this Black History Month, and she sat down with CBS 2 Investigator Dorothy Tucker.

READ MORE: PAWS Pet Of The Week: Digby

We have barely known the names of many past state public health directors. But Dr. Ezike has been guiding the state through the worst health crisis in recent history across the course of 151 press briefings - many of them daily.

This director, who happens to be the first Black woman to hold the position, was thrust into the spotlight.

Tucker: "When you took this job, I mean, nobody could have foreseen."

Ezike: "Oh no, no, the governor knew! He said: 'There's a pandemic around the corner, are you still good?' And I was like: 'Oh, bring it on! Bring it on!'"

She was joking about that, of course. Dr. Ezike was appointed to her role in January 2019, when the pandemic was more than a year in the future.

But as to Dr. Ezike being ready to step in during a time of crisis? That's very much real.

Ezike's résumé redefines the word "impressive." She was high school salutatorian, graduated with honors from Harvard University, got her M.D. from UCSD, served her residency at Rush University, and went on to become an internist and pediatrician. She is also fluent in five languages - English, French, Swahili, Portuguese, and Spanish - and has always conducted her daily coronavirus medical briefing in both English and Spanish.

What is not on the résumé, but is equally important, is her job as wife, mother of four, and enforcer of the pandemic rules.

"They haven't rebelled. No one has run away," Ezike said. "So I think we're OK."

READ MORE: 6 Firefighters Injured While Responding To Large Fire In Bridgeport

The rules are unpopular with some. The ban on sports prompted students and parents to protest near her home.

"That wasn't a problem," Ezike said. "They were far enough from my home."

What was a problem was the emails and the threats. When Tucker asked Ezike what one of the most painful emails she received was, she hesitated as she thought about that pain and the discussion moved on.

But of course, the public has also provided Dr. Ezike with words that make her smile - such as those found on a card that an Illinois nurse sent.

"Thank you for all you do. Thank you for not giving up. We do depend on you," the card read.

While she appreciates the personal notes, Dr. Ezike is quick to credit her staff.

"I don't want to be the headline. It's about the work," Ezike said. "But there are 1,200 people who are doing the work."

And it is stressful work - setting policies to slow the spread of the virus, stop the deaths, and equitably distribute the vaccines.

"We've taken tough decisions that are just not popular," Ezike said.

But they are decisions she stands by despite the backlash, like one of her heroes - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

MORE NEWS: Mayor Lightfoot Reports 'Truly Remarkable Progress' In Distributing COVID-19 Vaccines To Black, Latinx Populations

"He was on the FBI's Top Ten list. They put cameras and bugged his home. They called him an enemy of the state," Ezike said. "So at the time that you're doing things, it may not be appreciated, and obviously, history has been very kind to Martin Luther King Jr., and I hope history will look back on this time, and we'll be able to bring up the work that public health has done over this most incredible time."

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Celebrating Black History Makers: Dr. Ngozi Ezike Has Been Illinois' Guide During The COVID-19 Pandemic

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CHICAGO (CBS) - We are certainly living in unprecedented times - as over the past year, we've witnessed immeasurable suffering, from racial injustices as well as from the COVID-19 pandemic. Through it all, Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike has been the calm, yet commanding voice we've needed over the year.

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https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography - Amelia

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In a grainy, 1950s film from the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, a man gently washes the remains of a weaver bird. The bird is dead, but the act is tender. He dries it with compressed air, stuffs it, and mounts it with wire in the museum's diorama of African marsh birds. The film shows a number of people working on the diorama; all of them are white, except for the man stuffing the birds. His name is Carl Cotton, and he was the first African-American taxidermist to work at the Field Museum. For nearly 25 years, until his death in 1971, Cotton helped immortalize many of the animals that are currently on display at the museum.

Cotton has now become the subject of an exhibit at his former workplace, A Natural Talent: The Taxidermy of Carl Cotton, which is open until October 4, 2020. "The exhibit shows the human history behind displays that have been here for decades and decades," says Kate Golembiewski, a science communicator at the Field Museum. "It's amazing to be able to show a person who bucked the mold and made such a huge impact on the museum." Tori Lee, an exhibition developer at the museum who curated the exhibit, adds, "Carl was unique in his ability to do everything well."

The seed of the exhibit was planted when Reda Brooks, a budget coordinator in the museum's exhibitions department, began looking into the archives for stories to spotlight during Black History Month, which the museum had never officially celebrated before. In the museum's 125th anniversary book, she noticed a photo of Cotton preparing the Nile marsh diorama. "Reda showed me the photo and we were both shocked," Lee says. "I consider myself a muse," Brooks jokes.

Lee worked with Mark Alvey, the museum's academic communications manager, to gather all the information that they could find about Cotton. "A lot of people had seen photos of him in the archives over the years, but no one knew a lot about how he came to work here," Lee says. The duo scoured Ancestry.com and local obituaries for any trace of Cotton, and the museum's social media team invited the public to share stories about Cotton. Soon, a number of Cotton's friends and family reached out, and a portrait of his life began to take shape.

Cotton was born in 1918 and grew up in Washington Park, on the South Side of Chicago. He took up taxidermy at a young age and practiced on squirrels, birds, and dearly departed housepets, according to a video interview with Cotton's childhood friend, the historian and civil rights activist Timuel Black, that plays on loop in the exhibit. He visited the Field Museum for the first time on a school field trip, Brooks says. Cotton worked as a stenographer and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, but taxidermy remained his life's passion.

When Cotton first applied for taxidermy work at the museum in 1940, he was turned away. "The director of the museum replied and said, 'If you want to be a curator here, you need to have a PhD, you need to have made yourself known in the field,'" Lee says. When Cotton reached out again in 1947, he made his passion clearer and also volunteered to work for free. "My ambition is ... not doing just 'average' taxidermy but turning out work comparable to that of Carl Akeley, Leon Pray, Leon Walters and other artists," Cotton wrote, referencing the big-name taxidermists at the museum. The Field Museum hired Cotton part-time in the division of vertebrate anatomy, where Cotton did grunt work cleaning skeletons and preparing skins. He was promoted to full-time just a month later.

Lee watched the video of Cotton preparing the marsh birds many times while researching the exhibition. "It's an incredible video of him working, but there's no sound and you don't hear him at all," she says. "It made him kind of this silent figure for me." When she read Carl's 1947 letter, she couldn't help but tear up. "He suddenly became a person with a voice, who really cared about what he did and wanted to get better," Lee says, adding that the letter reminded her of her own application to work at the museum.

Cotton quickly rose through the ranks, Lee says. He worked mostly with birds, developing an exhibit on adaptive coloration and redoing much of the bird hall, but soon was called upon to work on the trickier reptiles and fish, as well as repair the larger mammals that had been taxidermied by Carl Akeley. Cotton also developed newer, experimental forms of taxidermy for animals with hairless skin: For example, he replicated a snapping turtle out of cellulose acetate. He was skilled at crafting plants, such as the lily pads in the Nile marsh diorama. "He went above and beyond what typical taxidermy was doing at the time," Lee says.

While researching the exhibition, Lee was able to identify several of Cotton's taxidermied specimens that were scattered around the museum with no labels. One specimen, a brown bittern hiding among brown reeds of grass, had been sitting in a classroom that Lee uses frequently. Now, all of Cotton's known specimens on display are attributed to their creator, Golembiewski says. Cotton's most famous work, Marsh Birds of the Upper Nile, remains on permanent display. "It's one of the most famous and iconic pieces at the museum," Brooks says.

This retrospective marks the first show Lee has curated at the Field Museum. "I'm not technically a curator, and making this show is outside my own job description," she says. "It was a labor of love." While the staff of the Field Museum has grown more diverse since Cotton's days, Lee says there are still institutional barriers to entry for prospective curators of color, including the PhD that was expected of Cotton so many years ago. "That's why places like the exhibitions department are more diverse than the curatorial department," she says.

When the Field Museum was founded in 1921, it perpetuated the colonialism and scientific racism on which natural history was built. "Typically people of color were people on display at the Field Museum, seen as others, people to look at and study and examine, and not as scientists and not researchers in their own right," Lee says. Races of Mankind, a 1933 exhibit that commissioned 104 bronze sculptures of people from around the world, "drew overt connections between race, biology, and hierarchy, making scientific racism a primary framework for the exhibition," writes Lucia Procopio in " Curating Racism: Understanding Field Museum Physical Anthropology from 1893 to 1969," published in The Museum Scholar in 2019. The exhibition stayed up until 1969, which included 23 years of Cotton's tenure at the museum.

Like many other natural history museums, the Field Museum has begun to reckon with this ugly history. In 2016, the museum opened a new exhibit that contextualized the racist history of the sculptures and identified many unnamed subjects. In October 2018, the museum announced a three-year redesign of its Native North America Hall, which originally opened in the 1950s under the name Indians before Columbus. The new exhibit, set to open in fall of 2021, represents a collaboration between museum curators and Chicago's Native community. The museum is located on the traditional land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples.

Lee is hesitant to call Cotton the first black taxidermist in Chicago, though she hasn't found any others just yet. She doesn't know whether Cotton was aware of other taxidermists of color, such as John Edmonstone, a formerly enslaved black man who taught Charles Darwin how to taxidermy birds. Lee hopes his story resonates with Chicagoans and inspires the museum to tell more stories about people from the African diaspora. "He grew up here, was raised here, and his family is still in the area," she says. "It just felt like a good story that in some ways was uncomplicated in its goodness, about a good guy who loved his work and followed his dreams."

Lee works on the fourth floor, which is the same floor where Cotton once worked. Nowadays, she recognizes bird specimens prepared by Cotton on display in conference rooms and common areas where she and Brooks eat lunch. "Sometimes when you work in a place that's really old, you forget how many people have walked these halls," Lee says. "It feels like he was here just the other day."

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The Black Taxidermist Who Made History at Chicago's Field Museum

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In a grainy, 1950s film from the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, a man gently washes the remains of a weaver bird. The bird is dead, but the act is tender. He dries it with compressed air, stuffs it, and mounts it with wire in the museum's diorama of African marsh birds.

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Ernest Everett Just - submitted by Alaysia M.

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Ernest Everett Just - submitted by Alaysia M.

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Ernest Everett Just was a pioneering African-American biologist, academic and science writer. Just's primary legacy is is recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in development of organisms.

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Overcome: My Life in Pursuit of a Dream
Ellamae Simmons, MD, with editorial collaboration by Rosemarie Robotham

Mill City Press, Minneapolis, 2016
Available via Google Books | Amazon

The arc of social justice relies on courageous individuals and Ellamae Simmons, MD, was one such individual. She was the first African-American woman to specialize in asthma, allergy, and immunology in the United States. She worked at Kaiser Permanente for 25 years, and to this day plays a central role in how Kaiser Permanente embraces diversity and inclusion.

Dr. Simmons' new biography at the age of 97 is a valuable contribution to that history. The book details her life and career, including graduating from Hampton (Virginia) nursing school in 1940, serving in the Army Nurse Corps during World War II, medical school at Meharry Medical College (Nashville) in 1954, and her Kaiser Permanente career.

Dr. Simmons' chapter titled "The Interview" is about her coming to work at Kaiser Permanente during the summer of 1965. Dr. Simmons had been training in chest medicine at National Jewish Hospital in Denver, at which Irving Itkin, MD, was her supervisor and mentor:

When I told Dr. Itkin of my plan to move west at the end of my residency, he was full of advice. "If you're going to California," he told me, "there are only two places you should consider. One is the Scripps clinic in La Jolla in Southern California, and the other is Kaiser Permanente in Northern California. Now," he continued, warming to the subject of my future training as an allergist, "Scripps is just another National Jewish. They write the same papers and conduct the same research. You'd basically be doing the same thing you did here.

At Kaiser, on the other hand, you'd round out your experience in a well-established outpatient allergy center, where asthmatics are well maintained on an established anti-allergenic regimen. And I recommend Ben Feingold, the chief of asthma-allergy at Kaiser. He's a good allergist, does fine research. Of course, he's difficult.... but I recommend you go there and learn everything he has to teach you about asthmatics whose condition is well controlled, who are ambulatory, who go to school or to work. After that you'll be well set up to take care of anybody in this field."

Ellamae Simmons graduation Hampton nursing school, 1940, from Overcome

Dr. Simmons' job interview with Ben Feingold, MD, has become legend in Kaiser Permanente history:

Dr. Ben Feingold sat back in his large bronze-studded black leather chair, scrutinizing me. He questioned me about my previous residencies, always calling me "Miss," never "Doctor." He asked me about my asthma-allergy fellowship, and more superficially about my chest medicine residency.

After about 30 minutes, he tented his fingers on his desk and said, "Well, I have my doubts about hiring anyone whom I have not trained, but please go out and see my secretary. We'll have to continue this another day, as I have another meeting." He told me to make an appointment with his secretary for the following Tuesday, which was five days away. I could ill afford the expense of additional nights at my hotel, plus meals, but I did not say this. Instead I made the appointment and spent the next few days exploring downtown San Francisco and biding my time.

I returned the following Tuesday for the continuation of our interview and entered Dr. Feingold's office as scheduled. Again the department chief sat back in his chair and viewed me intently. He asked a few questions about specific allergic reactions and how they might be treated at the institution of my residency. I answered easily and in meticulous clinical detail. At last he said,

"Well, I see you know your stuff, but I'm afraid I cannot hire you, as I've never hired anyone whom I have not trained."

"Dr. Feingold," I said, my voice steady, my gaze direct, "I've never applied for a job for which I was not fully qualified. In fact, I've usually been overqualified. So tell me, is the real reason you've decided not to hire me the fact that I'm Black?"

She asked Dr. Feingold if there were any other Black physicians at the Kaiser Permanente San Francisco hospital; it took him a while, but he finally remembered Granville Coggs, MD, a radiologist who'd joined the staff just a few months before. Dr. Simmons met with Dr. Coggs, and they shared experiences of racial discrimination pursuing their respective professions. She then returned to Dr. Feingold's office, resigned to not getting the position.

Dr. Feingold didn't respond at first. He just stared at me in that fixed way I was already becoming used to. I realized he was wrestling with a decision.

Finally, he spoke. "Stop by my secretary on your way out and sign your contract," he said. "I'll take you after all."

Dr. Ellamae Simmons, circa 1980

Among Dr. Simmons' battles was that of housing discrimination. Even in the relatively progressive San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1960s, covenants and real estate practices perpetuated racially segregated neighborhoods.

This discrimination also was experienced by another early Kaiser Permanente physician, Eugene Hickman, MD. His unpublished memoir includes a chapter titled "House Hunting While Black":

My major problem in Oakland was with housing ... I would phone all numbers regarding places within a radius that would afford reasonable access to the hospital where I was going to work. I was up front with my racial identity, after which I would summarize my credentials, etc. The response was always the same: "I am very sure you would be a very desirable member of our community, but we promised our neighbors we would not rent or sell to Negroes."

After several frustrating months, someone informed me of a place in Berkeley where I could go and apply for one of the homes that had been condemned to make way for the Grove-Shafter Freeway [California Highway 24]. We obtained an old house on 53rd Street, near Children's Hospital. I was then able to move our family here. Then we began the search for a permanent residence. My wife would go out with an agent during the day while I was working; the children were not yet in school. Some idiots frequently mistook my wife for a southern European. One agent ... suggested that if I wanted to see the house, I should come around after dark.

And if that wasn't discouraging enough, Dr. Hickman experienced discrimination about his choice of a job from an unexpected source. The Sinkler-Miller Medical Association in Oakland (named in honor of two outstanding Black physicians) accepted him for membership, but insisted on characterizing him "as some sort of traitor to the Black physician community" because of his affiliation with Kaiser Permanente.

Dr. Simmons' personal story is a tribute to persistence and vision overcoming adversity. Although we have come a long way in building social justice, there is always more to do - and pioneers such as Dr. Simmons inspire and guide us.

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Ellamae Simmons - trailblazing African American physician

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Overcome: My Life in Pursuit of a Dream Ellamae Simmons, MD, with editorial collaboration by Rosemarie Robotham Mill City Press, Minneapolis, 2016 Available via Google Books | Amazon The arc of social justice relies on courageous individuals and Ellamae Simmons, MD, was one such individual.

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In 1984, Alexa Canady, MD, FAANS(L), made history as the first African American woman certified as a diplomat of the American Board of Neurological Surgery (ABNS). Her medical career began in the early 1970s, at a time when women comprised less than 10 percent of an average medical school's graduating class. During this period, Congress wrestled with and eventually passed both the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, prohibiting discrimination in educational programs and activities receiving federal funds based on race and sex. Opportunities for women with respect to education were opening, albeit sluggishly, where they had not previously existed. During her first year of medical school, Dr. Canady fell in love with the nervous system and, in spite of discouragement from some of those surrounding her, she decided to pursue her passion of becoming a neurosurgeon. During this decade, the field of neurosurgery boasted only 22 board-certified neurosurgeons who were women, none of whom were African American. After completing an internship at Yale University (1975-1976) and residency at the University of Minnesota (1976-1981), Dr. Canady became both the first woman and the first African American to graduate from a neurosurgical training program in the state of Minnesota.

With hard work, diligence and a talent for navigating obstacles placed before her, Dr. Canady blazed a path towards achieving her goals. During her training, she was instantly attracted to the subspecialty of pediatric neurosurgery, appreciating its collaborative and positive environment as well as its sense of community. "I loved that you get to play while at work," she remarks. She completed a pediatric neurosurgical fellowship at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia from 1981 to 1982, and soon after was hired into the faculty of Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital. In 1987, at the age of 36, she was named the chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital of Michigan, and charged with the development of a pediatric neurosurgical service line.

During this time, Detroit was a city at the height of turmoil, with widespread racial inequities and skyrocketing rates of poverty. Forty-seven percent of children under the age of 18 were living below the poverty line, and access to healthcare was of particular concern. Over the course of 15 years, Dr. Canady dedicated herself tirelessly to the development of an organized and well-developed pediatric neurosurgical program with the aim of offering the highest level of care to the children of the Detroit community. She is passionate about providing all patients access to excellent care, regardless of their means. Her approach is patient-centered, with a focus on providing care and resources to empower her patients and their families. She steadily raised money through fundraisers and by recruiting the support of charity organizations and, under her leadership, the division made food and monetary donations to financially disadvantaged patients. To inspire patients, she started support groups and was industrious in her advocacy for their needs to the broader community. In 2001, Child magazine ranked the Children's Hospital of Michigan among the "10 Best Children's Hospitals in America" and Dr. Canady as the hospital's most outstanding representative physician.

Despite the challenges and mounting demands of providing care to an underserved community, Dr. Canady continued to advance the field of pediatric neurosurgery through her research. Her contributions, particularly in the management of hydrocephalus and dysraphism, are widespread and led to numerous publications and presentations. Dr. Canady educated and trained medical students and residents, creating a legacy of excellence in surgical skills, compassionate clinical care and innovation through research. She also directly and indirectly mentored countless others, including minority high school students throughout the Detroit region who are interested in pursuing careers in medicine.

Read More
President's Perspective: The Privilege of Service A Neurosurgeon Could Save Your Life Tonight Neurosurgical Integrity and the Privilege of Service
In 2001, at the culmination of a successful career in Michigan, she retired to Pensacola, Fla., with her husband, a retired Naval officer. After a short period, however, she came out of retirement when it came to her attention that there was no dedicated pediatric neurosurgical service in her part of the Florida Panhandle. "Patients sometimes had to travel 400 miles to get specialty care," she notes, and further describes how this was especially taxing on a financially disadvantaged population. So, back to service she went and over the course of eight years she created another successful pediatric neurosurgical service, eventually recruiting other pediatric neurosurgeons to secure its future.

Her passion and dedication to excellence have been recognized through many awards and honors, including induction into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame and receipt of the American Women's Medical Association's President's Award. Dr. Canady is a true pioneer who has devoted her distinguished career to caring for underprivileged children and breaking barriers that stymie access to healthcare. Her commitment, perseverance and exemplary service to her community are a true inspiration to the field of neurosurgery.

Sharona Ben-Haim, MD, is an assistant professor of Neurosurgery at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Science. Her interests are in functional neurosurgery, including novel indications of the use of deep brain stimulation (DBS), advancements in minimally invasive surgical treatments of epilepsy and the neurosurgical management of refractory pain.

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Serving the Underprivileged: Alexa Irene Canady, MD, FAANS(L) - AANS Neurosurgeon

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In 1984, Alexa Canady, MD, FAANS(L), made history as the first African American woman certified as a diplomat of the American Board of Neurological Surgery (ABNS). Her medical career began in the early 1970s, at a time when women comprised less than 10 percent of an average medical school's graduating class.

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ladys West knew from a young age that she didn't want to be a farmer. But the mathematician, born in 1930 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, still had to help harvest crops on her family's small farm. The hard work started before daybreak and lasted well into the blistering heat of the afternoon. She hated the dirt but, while she worked, she kept her mind on the building behind the trees at the end of the farm. It was her school, and even then she knew it would be her ticket to freedom.

"I was gonna get an education and I was going to get out of there. I wasn't going to be stuck there all my life," West, 89, says firmly, on Zoom in her home in Virginia.

What she could not have guessed was that this focus would shatter the perceptions of black women of the time and even lead to the invention of one of our most widely used inventions - GPS, the global positioning system.

The red schoolhouse, as West's elementary school was known, was a three-mile walk away, through the woods and over streams. The seven year groups, who were all black, were taught in one room, but West quickly stood out.

Her parents tried to save some money to send her to college, but unexpected bills kept hitting the fund. If West was going to go to college, she needed to find a way to pay for it herself. She tried to put money aside, but became frustrated at how little progress she was making. Then a teacher announced that the state was going to give a college scholarship to the two top students from her year. It was her golden opportunity.

"I started doing everything so that I would be at the top," West says. "And sure enough, when I graduated from high school, I got one." The scholarship allowed West to attend Virginia State College, a historically black university.

She didn't have much time to celebrate. While her tuition was paid, she needed money for room and board. Her parents could help for the first year, but she would need to find funding for the others. She confided in her maths teacher who, after seeing her potential, offered her a part-time job babysitting.

She quickly learned that, while she had been the best in her rural school, she had to put in work to keep up with students from bigger cities. "I was so dedicated that I didn't care about missing the fun. But now I look back and I should have," she says before laughing.

She decided to major in mathematics because it was a well-respected subject. It was largely studied by men, but she didn't take much notice of them. "I knew deep in my heart that nothing was getting in my way."

After graduating, she became a teacher, saving money for graduate school. She returned to the university a few years later and earned a master's in mathematics. She briefly took on another teaching position after graduating. Then she was offered a job at a naval base in Dahlgren, Virginia. This made her only the second black woman to be hired to work as a programmer at the base. And she was one of only four black employees.

West at work in the Dahlgren naval base in 1981.

When she started her job, the navy was bringing in computers. She was hired to do programming and coding for the huge machines. She felt proud that she got the job, but knew the hard work had just begun. Despite her intellectual abilities and career success, West had long wrestled with the feeling that she was inferior. It was this feeling, deeply ingrained and felt, she thinks, by many African Americans, that drove her to work as hard as she could.

She still remembers her first day. The military base was grey, and people were mingling before starting work, laughing and drinking coffee. She met the man who would become her husband, Ira West - but refused to be distracted and at first largely ignored him. "I just got there and I was a serious woman. I didn't have time to be playing around," she says.

Her white colleagues were friendly and respectful, but initially didn't socialise with her outside the office - something she tried not to let get to her. "You know how you know that kind of thing is going on, but you won't let it take advantage of you? I started to think to myself that I'll be a role model as the black me, as West, to be the best I can be, doing my work and getting recognition for my work," she says.

The naval base was its own world, so it felt isolating at times. While West's office was not racially segregated, a fierce civil-rights battle was unfolding across the country, particularly in the south, partly focusing on segregation. Outside the base, there were sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and places of transport. Her friends from college were deeply involved. West and her husband"supported what they were doing ... and kept our eyes on what was developing".

West was conflicted. She supported the peaceful protests, but was told that she couldn't participate because of her government work. So she decided to focus on a quieter revolution, one she could continue inside the base. She visited the demonstrations and came back determined to commit herself to her work. She hoped that, by doing it to the best of her ability, she could chip away at the stigma black people faced. "They hadn't worked with us, they don't know [black people] except to work in the homes and yards, and so you gotta show them who you really are," she explains. "We tried to do our part by being a role model as a black person: be respectful, do your work and contribute while all this is going on."

West did just that. She quickly climbed the ranks and gained the admiration and respect of her colleagues. The work was hard and she had to deal with large datasets. "You had to be particular. You can learn the process, but then you have to really make sure you create the process just right, so everything would come out all right," she says.

At the house that she and her husband built between 1976 and 1979.

In the early 60s, West took part in an award-winning study that proved "the regularity of Pluto's motion relative to Neptune", according to a 2018 press release by the US air force. In 1979, she received a commendation for her hard work from her departmental head. She then became project manager for the Seasat radar altimetry project; Seasat was the first satellite that could monitor the oceans. She oversaw a team of five people. She programmed an IBM 7030 Stretch computer, which was significantly faster than other machines at the time, to provide calculations for an accurate geodetic Earth model. This detailed mathematical model of the shape of the Earth was a building block for what would become the GPS orbit.

While her team laid the groundwork for GPS, West took every opportunity the base gave her. She went to classes in the evening and gained another master's degree in public administration, this time from the University of Oklahoma.

In 1998, aged 68, after spending more than four decades at the base, West knew it was time to retire, but she was terrified at the thought of not working. So after retirement she intended to focus on her PhD. But then she had a stroke.

"I was just sitting there working on the computer and all of a sudden I started spinning around," West says. As soon as she left hospital, she started working on her recovery. "I never stopped one moment just to feel sorry for myself and say: 'Oh boy, I'd never make it.' I just said: 'What's next?'"

She would eventually finish her dissertation and gain her PhD in public administration and policy affairs in 2000 at the age of 70.

Looking back, West says she didn't know she was revolutionising technology across the world. "You never think that anything you are doing militarily is going to be that exciting. We never thought about it being transferred to civilian life, so that was a pleasant surprise."

West's contributions went unrecognised not just by herself, but others too. Her 42-year career at the navy base was largely unremarked. But years later, she sent a short autobiography to a sorority function. To her surprise, her sorority sisters were blown away. "I just thought it was my work, and we'd never talk to our friends about work. I just never thought about it. I didn't brag about what I was working on," West says. "But to see other people so excited about it, that was amazing."

With her husband, Ira.

Her sorority sisters weren't the only ones that were excited. West soon started to get recognition as one of the "hidden figures" for her contribution to the development of GPS. In 2018, West was inducted into the US air force hall of fame. Her work has at last been written into history. She knows it's a feat that is rare for black women.

"We always get pushed to the back because we are not usually the ones that are writing the book of the past. It was always them writing and they wrote about people they thought were acceptable. And now we're getting a little bit more desire to pull up everyone else that's made a difference."

When West watched the film Hidden Figures, a drama about a trio of African American female mathematicians working for Nasa, she finally felt seen. "I really loved the movie and I didn't know that that was going on with them. But they were doing something similar," she says. It made her realise there were probably many hidden groups of black women making important scientific contributions across the world.

"I felt proud of myself as a woman, knowing that I can do what I can do. But as a black woman, that's another level where you have to prove to a society that hasn't accepted you for what you are. What I did was keep trying to prove that I was as good as you are," she said. "There is no difference in the work we can do."

She is appreciative of all the protesters that have come together in recent months to march for Black Lives Matter. "I'm hoping that, from that, we become better people, closer to the reality of who we really are, and the world becomes more united than it is now," West says.

She hopes the call for justice on the street translates into concrete proposals that support more women and black people in science and mathematics. She wants more to be done to encourage underrepresented groups through scholarships and tailored training programmes.

But while West is incredibly proud of the work she did in helping develop GPS, she doesn't use it herself - preferring to stick to paper maps. "I'm a doer, hands-on kind of person. If I can see the road and see where it turns and see where it went, I am more sure."

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Gladys West: the hidden figure who helped invent GPS

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ladys West knew from a young age that she didn't want to be a farmer. But the mathematician, born in 1930 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, still had to help harvest crops on her family's small farm. The hard work started before daybreak and lasted well into the blistering heat of the afternoon.

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As a young girl, Olivia Juliette Hooker '62 (PhD) witnessed one of the most violent and deadly riots in United States history, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. It left as many as 300 dead, more than 1,000 homes and businesses destroyed, and 10,000 people homeless in Greenwood, Oklahoma, a once-prosperous area known as "The Black Wall Street."

The images of hatred and injustice never left Hooker. Throughout her lifetime, Hooker led efforts to gain recognition and restitution for those who lost their loved ones, homes, and livelihoods in the massacre.

After losing their family department store in the riot, the Hooker family fled Tulsa and settled in Columbus, Ohio, with next to nothing.

Determined to rise above her circumstances, Hooker went on to achieve a bachelor's degree in education from Ohio State University. She then taught and encouraged third graders in Columbus for several years.

"If you dwell on your misery, you're not helping yourself or anybody else. So, if you think, 'What can I do to keep this from happening again?' that helps you go forward, rather than spending your life pitying yourself."

-Olivia Hooker

In World War II, Hooker hoped to serve her country despite her early disillusionment. However, the US Navy refused to enlist a woman of color.

Hooker did not give up. Instead, she enlisted with the US Coast Guard, becoming the first African American woman to serve in active duty.

After the war, Hooker attended graduate school on the GI Bill, achieving a master's degree from Columbia University and, in 1961, a doctorate in psychology from the University of Rochester.

As a teacher, mentor, and clinician, Hooker devoted the rest of her life to helping people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She cited fairness and an open mind as keys to her success.

"It's not about you, or me, but it's about what we can give to this world."

-Olivia Hooker

Hooker turned lives around at the Albion Correctional Facility for women in Albion, New York. She offered therapy and support to children with learning disabilities as a director at the Kennedy Child Study Center in New York City. And, she inspired and mentored students of color for 22 years as a senior clinical lecturer and an APA Honors Professor at Fordham University.

Even after her retirement in 1963, Hooker continued to help children with developmental disabilities at the Fred Keller School for Behavioral Analysis until the age of 87.

In October 2019, the US Coast Guard announced the commission of their 61st Sentinel Class, fast-response cutter, the USCGC Olivia Hooker.

As President Barack Obama pointed out in his address at the 134th Commencement of the Coast Guard Academy, Hooker was "a tireless voice for justice and equality." Indeed, she embodied the US Coast Guard motto, Semper Paratus (Always Ready).

Awards and Honors

American Psychological Association Presidential Citation

New York State Senate Veterans' Hall of Fame inductee

The Olivia Hooker Dining Facility, Staten Island Coast Guard Facility, named in her honor

Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft dedicated a training center within Coast Guard Headquarters named in her honor

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Olivia Hooker (1915-2018) | Celebration 2020 | University of Rochester

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As a young girl, Olivia Juliette Hooker '62 (PhD) witnessed one of the most violent and deadly riots in United States history, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. It left as many as 300 dead, more than 1,000 homes and businesses destroyed, and 10,000 people homeless in Greenwood, Oklahoma, a once-prosperous area known as "The Black Wall Street."

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Benjamin Banneker, (born November 9, 1731, Banneky farm [now in Oella], Maryland [U.S.]-died October 19? [ see Researcher's Note], 1806, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.), mathematician, astronomer, compiler of almanacs, inventor, and writer, one of the first important African American intellectuals.

Banneker, a freeman, was raised on a farm near Baltimore that he would eventually inherit from his father. Although he periodically attended a one-room Quaker schoolhouse, Banneker was largely self-educated and did much of his learning through the voracious reading of borrowed books. Early on he demonstrated a particular facility for mathematics. While still a young man (probably about age 20), he built a wooden clock that kept precise time. Banneker was encouraged in the study of astronomy by George Ellicott, a Quaker and amateur astronomer whose family owned nearby mills. As early as 1788, Banneker began to make astronomical calculations, and he accurately predicted a solar eclipse that occurred in 1789. In 1791, while working with Andrew Ellicott and others in surveying the land that would become Washington, D.C., Banneker made other astronomical observations.

As an essayist and pamphleteer, Banneker opposed slavery and advocated civil rights. In 1791 he sent Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. secretary of state, a letter asking Jefferson's aid in bringing about better conditions for African Americans. With the letter, Banneker also sent a handwritten copy of the manuscript for his 1792 Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris, which he continued to publish annually through 1797.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Jeff Wallenfeldt.

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Benjamin Banneker | Letter to Jefferson, Clock, Almanac, & Facts

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Benjamin Banneker, African American mathematician, astronomer, compiler of almanacs, inventor, and writer who helped survey Washington, D.C. He was also noted for essays and pamphlets in which he opposed slavery and supported civil rights. Learn more about Banneker's life and career.

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Leland Melvin

Leland Melvin served as co-program manager of the Educator Astronaut program. The program, which began in January 2003, is part of NASA's effort to connect space exploration with the classroom and to inspire the next generation of explorers.
On becoming an astronaut:
Melvin did not intend to become an astronaut. He was working at NASA's Langley Research Center helping to develop fiber optic sensors. These are used to check for hydrogen leaks on NASA's space shuttle. A co-worker gave him an astronaut application and told him he thought Melvin would make a great astronaut. Melvin did not apply for that class. When the next round of astronauts were being chosen, Melvin's friend once again handed him an application. This time, Melvin applied and was accepted into the program in 1998.
On role models:
Deems and Grace Melvin have always been Melvin's inspiration. Both of his parents are educators. Melvin remembers being with his father and having former students approach them. Melvin realized his parents' importance to the community when students would say, "If it wasn't for your parents' influence, I don't know where I would be today." When these students brought their children to meet his parents, he realized that his parents didn't just have an impact on one person--they impacted families! Mr. and Mrs. Melvin guided their son in the same manner. His father taught him how to throw a ball and to believe he could do whatever he wanted to do. His mother read to him nightly. Among his favorite books were Curious George and The Little Engine That Could. Curious George reminded him of himself--curious to the point of getting into trouble sometimes. The Little Engine That Could gave Melvin the motto he uses to this day--"I think I can, I think I can."
On school:
Melvin's favorite academic subject was mathematics. He enjoyed playing football, basketball, and tennis. When asked how he mixed athletics with science, he said he used math and science to make him a better athlete. Melvin used the theories he learned in classes to control the spiral of the ball as he released it from his hand. He had a physics teacher in high school that related everything to sports. This kept Melvin interested in both! Melvin said that participating in sports has helped make him a better astronaut. "Sports are all about teamwork. You can't win a game if you can't work with your team. Working in the tight spaces of the Shuttle or the Station takes teamwork, as well. You can't be a good astronaut if you can't get along with the people around you."
On going into space:
"My hobby is photography. I can't wait to float over to the nearest window." He is looking forward to seeing the Earth as it really is. "Blues, greens, browns . . . no borders. One globe for everyone, thinking about everyone below working and playing. I think this is a way I can help promote peace in the world."
His advice to future explorers:
"Stay curious. Remember, no matter how big or small, no matter what your background, no matter who your parents are--you can succeed. So, eat your green beans and study hard."
Points of interest:
Leland Melvin was a skateboard enthusiast who not only skated, but also built the boards. He has been a tennis instructor and a pro football player. He played football at the University of Richmond, where he was inducted into the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division One Academic All American Hall of Fame. Melvin still holds Richmond's career records for receptions and receiving yards. He caught at least one pass in each of the 39 games he played. He was drafted by the National Football League's Detroit Lions in 1986 and later spent time with the Dallas Cowboys and the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League before retiring due to injuries and beginning his NASA career. He now enjoys taking his motorcycle on cross-country rides. He has already been from Texas to Virginia and from Virginia to Colorado. He still feels like a kid and enjoys life with a youthful energy.

Biographical Data
Hometown: Lynchburg, Virginia
Born: February 15, 1964
Education: Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia; Master of Science degree in Materials Science Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
NASA experience: Fiber Optics Sensors Group, Langley Research Center. He is an astronaut currently assigned to the Education Department at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

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NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

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Leland Melvin Leland Melvin served as co-program manager of the Educator Astronaut program. The program, which began in January 2003, is part of NASA's effort to connect space exploration with the classroom and to inspire the next generation of explorers. On becoming an astronaut: Melvin did not intend to become an astronaut.

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Navy Lt. j.g. Madeline Swegle is making history by becoming the first known Black female tactical air pilot in the U.S. Navy's history.

The news was announced in a July 9 tweet sent out by the Naval Air Training Command who congratulated Swegle on completing her Tactical Air (Strike) pilot training syllabus. According to the Navy Times, Swegle, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2017, will now be able to fly aircrafts like the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, the F-35C Joint Strike Fighter and the EA-18G Growler.

News of Swegle's accomplishment comes 40 years after Lt. Cmdr. Brenda Robinson made history in 1980 as the first Black female graduate from Aviation Officer Candidate School, reports the Navy Times. In 1981, she made history again by becoming the first Black woman certified for C-1A carrier onboard delivery carrier landings. And later in her career, according to Women in Aviation International, Robinson went on to become the first Black female flight instructor, evaluator and VIP transport pilot in the Navy.

Swegle's accomplishment also comes 19 years after Capt. Vernice "FlyGirl" Armour became the first Black female pilot in the Marine Corps in 2001, and the first Black female combat pilot in the entire U.S. military, according to Military.com.

With the Navy's aviation department being composed of mostly white men, Swegle's history-making achievement breaks both gender and racial glass ceilings. According to a 2018 investigation of racial bias in the training of naval aviators, Military.com found that of the 1,404 pilots who flew F/A-18 Hornets, just 26 were Black. The investigation also found that there were just 33 female Hornet pilots in the Navy, and all but one were White.

On June 30, the Navy announced that it was creating a task force to "address the issues of racism, sexism and other destructive biases and their impact on naval readiness."

"We are at a critical inflection point for our Nation and our Navy and I want to ensure that we are fully responding to this moment as we work to facilitate enduring change," said Navy's Chief of Personnel Vice Adm. John Nowell Jr. in a press statement. "We must use the momentum created by these events as a catalyst for positive change. We need to have a deeper inclusion and diversity conversation in our Navy and amongst our own teams."

Later this month, the Navy says that Swegle will receive her "wings of gold" for completing her training.In addition to receiving congratulatory messages from other Navy members, Swegle also received congratulations tweets from many prominent figures including Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Check out: Don't miss: Meet Danielle Geathers, MIT's first Black woman student body president in the school's 159-year history The best credit cards of 2020 could earn you over $1,000 in 5 years

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Madeline Swegle makes history as U.S. Navy's first Black female tactical jet pilot

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Navy Lt. j.g. Madeline Swegle is making history by becoming the first known Black female tactical air pilot in the U.S. Navy's history. The news was announced in a July 9 tweet sent out by the Naval Air Training Command who congratulated Swegle on completing her Tactical Air (Strike) pilot training syllabus.

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African-American Agricultural scientist
George Washington Carver was an agricultural scientist and inventor who developed hundreds of products using peanuts (though not peanut butter, as is often claimed), sweet potatoes and soybeans. More on George Washington Carver in the website https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/george-washington-carver#:~:text=George%20Washington%20Carver%20was%20an,)%2C%20sweet%20potatoes%20and%20soybeans.

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Emmett W. Chappelle (October 24, 1925 - October 14, 2019) was an American scientist who made valuable contributions in the fields of medicine, philanthropy, food science, and astrochemistry. His achievements led to his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work on Bio-luminescence, in 2007. Being honored as one of the 100 most distinguished African American scientists of the 20th Century, he was also one of the members of the American Chemical Society, the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Society of Photobiology, the American Society of Microbiology, and the American Society of Black Chemists.

In 1925, Emmett Chappelle was born in Phoenix, Arizona to his parents, Viola White Chappelle and Isom Chappelle, who grew cotton and raised cattle on their farm. Born into segregation, Chappelle was required to attend the segregated Phoenix Union Colored High School in Phoenix, where he was the top graduate of his senior class of 25 students. Upon graduation, in 1942, Emmett enlisted in the army where he was able to take some engineering courses before being assigned to the 92nd Infantry Division that was stationed in Italy. During his time in the service, he suffered two non-fatal wounds in action. After his return from Italy in 1946, he attended Phoenix College where he studied electrical engineering and received an A.A. degree before he redirected his focus and career towards the sciences.

In 1950, Chappelle received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, then served as an instructor of biochemistry at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1950 to 1953, without graduate training. He then left Tennessee to continue his education at the University of Washington where he received his master's degree, also in Biochemistry. From 1955 to 1958, he worked as a research associate at Stanford University where he was also appointed as a scientist and biochemist for the Research Institute of Advanced Studies until 1963.

Then, in 1958, Chappelle joined the Research Institute in Baltimore, a division of the Martin Marietta Corporation that was famous for designing airplanes and spacecraft. There, Chappelle made a major discovery that has largely contributed to the knowledge of bacteria, cyanobacteria, and other single-celled organisms around the world. He discovered that even single-celled organisms such as algae, are photosynthetic, meaning they are able to convert carbon dioxide to sugar and water into oxygen. The ability to photosynthesize is characteristic of all plants that is the opposite process of cellular respiration, which all organisms use to create the energy needed for life. Algal photosynthesis has been essential to allowing astronauts to have a constantly renewing source of oxygen. This knowledge was not only beneficial to astronauts because it allowed scientists to develop a method for creating clean oxygen for astronauts in space, but it also provided them with a safe food source (the algae itself) that is capable of reproducing in space.

In 1963, Chappelle went to work at Hazelton Laboratories, now known as Covance Inc., as a biochemist but later joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA) as an exobiologist and astrochemist, in 1966. As an exobiologist and astrochemist of NASA, someone who focuses towards the search for extraterrestrial life and studies the chemistry of astronomical objects, he worked on the Viking Spacecraft and helped develop instruments to collect and scrape soil from the surface of Mars. However, he was most well known for his work on biolumenescence. In 1977 he was moved to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as a remote sensing scientist, studying natural systems to improve environmental management.

Some of Chappelle's most interesting work was in the area of luminescence, which is light without heat. While designing instruments for the Mars Viking spacecraft, he became interested in bio luminescence, which is warm light produced by living organisms. Chappelle developed a method using two chemicals, luciferase and luciferin, from fireflies which give off light when mixed with ATP ( adenosine triphosphate), an energy storage compound found in all living cells, to detect the presence of ATP. This method for ATP detection can be used to detect life on other planets as well as microbiological organisms. Chappelle also proved that the number of bacteria in water can be measured by the amount of light given off by that bacteria. This discovery allowed scientists and doctors to detect small amounts of bacteria in places such as urine, in order to detect an onset of a bacterial infection. Additionally, he developed a method for determining vegetation health by using laser-induced fluorescence to measure the amount of photosynthesis occurring in crops, allowing scientists to detect plant stress, determine growth rates, water conditions, and harvest timing.

Chappelle retired from NASA in 2001, at the age of 76. He died in Baltimore, Maryland on October 14, 2019, at the age of 93.

1. July 27, 1976: Method of detecting and counting bacteria
An improved method is provided for determining bacterial levels, especially in samples of aqueous physiological fluids, which method depends on the quantitative determination of bacterial adenosine triphosphate (ATP) in the presence of non-bacterial ATP. The bacterial ATP is released by cell rupture and is measured by an enzymatic bioluminescent assay. A concentration technique is included to make the method more sensitive. It is particularly useful where the fluid to be measured contains an unknown or low bacteria count.

2. March 29, 1977: Application of luciferase assay for ATP to antimicrobial drug susceptibility
The susceptibility of bacteria, particularly those derived from body fluids, to antimicrobial agents is determined in terms of an ATP index measured by culturing a bacterium in a growth medium, assaying the amount of ATP in a sample of the cultured bacterium by measuring the amount of luminescent light emitted when the bacterial ATP is reacted with a luciferase-luciferin mixture, subjecting the sample of the cultured bacterium to an antibiotic agent and assaying the amount of bacterial adenosine triphosphate after treatment with the antibiotic by measuring the luminescent light resulting from the reaction, whereby the ATP index is determined from the values obtained from the assay procedures.

3. January 2, 1979: Determination of antimicrobial susceptibilities on infected urines without isolation
Method for the quick determination of the susceptibilities of various unidentified bacteria contained in an aqueous physiological fluid sample, particularly urine, to one or more antibiotics. A bacterial adenosine triphosphate (ATP) assay is carried out after the elimination of non-bacterial ATP to determine whether an infection exists. If an infection does exist, a portion of the sample is further processed, including subjecting parts of the portion to one or more antibiotics. Growth of the bacteria in the parts are determined, again by an ATP assay, to determine whether the unidentified bacteria in the sample are susceptible to the antibiotic or antibiotics under test.

4. May 24, 1983: Rapid, quantitative determination of bacteria in water
A bioluminescent assay for ATP in water borne bacteria is made by adding nitric acid to a water sample with concentrated bacteria to rupture the bacterial cells. The sample is diluted with sterile, deionized water, then mixed with a luciferase-luciferin mixture and the resulting light output of the bioluminescent reaction is measured and correlated with bacteria present. A standard and a blank also are processed so that the light output can be correlated to bacteria in the sample and system "noise" can be subtracted from the readings. A chemiluminescent assay for iron porphyrins in water borne bacteria is made by adding luminol reagent to a water sample with concentrated bacteria and measuring the resulting light output of the chemiluminescent reaction. The light output is correlated with bacteria present. A standard and a blank are also processed so that the light output can be correlated to bacteria in the sample and system "noise" can be subtracted from the readings(reword)

5. May 2, 1995: Method for determining surface coverage by materials exhibiting different fluorescent properties
An improved method for detecting, measuring, and distinguishing crop residue, live vegetation, and mineral soil. By measuring fluorescence in multiple bands, live and dead vegetation are distinguished. The surface of the ground is illuminated with ultraviolet radiation, inducing fluorescence in certain molecules. The emitted fluorescent emission induced by the ultraviolet radiation is measured by means of a fluorescence detector, consisting of a photodetector or video camera and filters. The spectral content of the emitted fluorescent emission is characterized at each point sampled, and the proportion of the sampled area covered by residue or vegetation is calculated.

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Emmett W. Chappelle (October 24, 1925 - October 14, 2019) was an American scientist who made valuable contributions in the fields of medicine, philanthropy, food science, and astrochemistry. His achievements led to his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work on Bio-luminescence, in 2007.

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https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-names-headquarters-after-hidden-figure-mary-w-jackson

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When Alice Ball made the discovery that brought leprosy patients back from certain death, she wasn't just young - she was also a black woman in Jim Crow-era America.

In 1915, a young black chemist named Alice Ball revolutionized the treatment for leprosy, a painful and stigmatized disease. Decades before the development of antibiotics, Ball devised a method for treating lepers that allowed them to live without being ostracized or isolated.

But how did Alice Ball, a black woman in Jim Crow-era America, become such a pioneer in science?

Alice Ball Was Born To Break Barriers

On July 24, 1892, Laura and James Ball welcomed their first daughter, Alice Ball, to their family.

The Balls lived in Seattle's Central District where James worked as a lawyer and Laura as a photographer. Alice Ball's grandfather was also a pioneer as one of the first photographers to use the daguerreotype method which prints images on metal plates.

During her childhood, Ball lived in Honolulu for a few years before returning to Seattle where she graduated from Seattle High School in 1910.

After receiving top marks, Ball enrolled at the University of Washington and studied pharmacy and chemistry. She earned a degree in pharmaceutical chemistry and returned to Hawaii for a master's degree in chemistry at the College of Hawaii, now the University of Hawaii.

She specialized in isolating the active components in the kava root, a plant native to the Pacific Islands, and while working on her master's, Ball published two articles in the world's most prestigious chemistry journal.

Upon her graduation in 1915, Ball became the first woman and the first black student to earn a master's degree in chemistry from the College of Hawaii.

The college then offered Ball a position as a chemistry instructor and she became the first woman to teach chemistry at the college - at just 23 years old.

In addition to her teaching, Ball continued working on plant biochemistry in the laboratory. Her work was quickly recognized by Dr. Harry T. Hollmann, the director of the Kalihi leprosy clinic, and he contacted Ball for help in finding a better treatment for the disease.

Traditional leprosy treatments relied on oil from the chaulmoogra tree that would be applied as a topical ointment, but this was not all that effective. Hollman wanted Ball to isolate the oil and create an injectable treatment instead.

Within a year, Ball did just that.

It would be the most important leprosy treatment before the advent of antibiotics.

Combatting A Death Sentence

Prior to Ball's innovation, leprosy - also known as Hansen's Disease - was considered an incurable disease with no effective treatments.

The disease also carried a heavy stigma. Lepers were isolated or shuttered away from their families at special colonies where they couldn't infect others. There was one such colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai which housed 8,000 residents over the course of its existence. Indeed, the government even declared all the lepers there legally dead.

James Harnisch, head of the Hansen's Disease Clinic at the Harborview Medical Center, recently said that prior to the early 20th century, "There was no treatment at that point in time at all, so it was a matter of just offering care while you're watching the disease progress to destroy the face, destroy the hands, the arms. It was a very sad situation."

In 1873, scientists first identified the bacteria that caused leprosy. Yet the painful disease still had few effective treatments. A Chinese and Indian folk remedy involved oil from the chaulmoogra tree. But with no way to safely inject the oil, patients who tried this treatment were beset with painful side effects.

That is until Alice Ball developed her new method.

The Groundbreaking Ball Method Offered New Life To Lepers

In the lab, Alice Ball first successfully isolated the active ingredient in chaulmoogra oil.

"People were struggling with what do you do with this oil which, if you let it sit, it just hardens into, like, lard," explained Paul Wermager, head of the science library at the University of Hawaii. "But using alcohol you make it into what's called an ethyl ester. Then it becomes water-soluble, and that was the breakthrough that she made."

Ball created history's first effective and pain-relieving treatment for leprosy, appropriately named the "Ball Method."

At Molokai's leper colony, the "Ball Method" gave patients formerly seen as hopeless a new lease on life. The treatment eliminated their symptoms and proved so effective that leprosy patients around the world were discharged from their isolation in hospitals and sent home.

"People who did finally get the injections did show remarkable improvements," Wermager continued. "I've found photographs, and they're just startling. The person looks like, really, a different person."

Ball's Untimely Death And Legacy

In a preparatory lecture during World War I, Ball was showing her students how to properly use a gas mask. But an accident during the presentation exposed her to chlorine gas. As the Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser explained, "While instructing her class in September 1916, Miss Ball suffered from chlorine poisoning."

Ball became seriously ill and returned to Seattle where she died within months at the age of 24.

Even in death, Alice Ball faced barriers in her scientific career when Dr. Arthur Dean, the president of the College of Hawaii, took credit for her research into chaulmoogra oil - and he even renamed her discovery the "Dean Method."

Fortunately, Dr. Hollmann, who first turned to Ball for help in treating leprosy, published a paper that named her as the true inventor of the method.

"You have to understand, she was doing this before women had the right to vote," explained Dr. Harnisch. "This is amazing. And again, she was an African American woman. Phenomenal that she could get this far."

Recently, Ball's groundbreaking career has finally received the attention it deserves. In 2017, Paul Wermager established a scholarship opportunity at the University of Hawaii to recognize her. He explained:

"Not only did she overcome the racial and gender barriers of her time to become one of the very few African American women to earn a master's degree in chemistry, [but she] also developed the first useful treatment for Hansen's disease."

Wermager adds, "Her amazing life was cut too short at the age of 24. Who knows what other marvelous work she could have accomplished had she lived."

Ball now holds a posthumous Medal of Distinction from the University of Hawaii and a plaque on campus reminds students and visitors of Ball's achievements. Hawaii recognizes February 29th as Alice Ball Day.
Alice Ball wasn't the only woman in science ignored by history. Learn about the female scientists who fought for their recognition. Then, check out these startling photographs of segregation in America.

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Meet Alice Ball, The 23-Year-Old Black Scientist Who Revolutionized Leprosy Treatment

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In 1915, a young black chemist named Alice Ball revolutionized the treatment for leprosy, a painful and stigmatized disease. Decades before the development of antibiotics, Ball devised a method for treating lepers that allowed them to live without being ostracized or isolated.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist who hosted ‘NOVA ScienceNow’ and makes media appearances to encourage science and space exploration.

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Marie Maynard Daly -submitted by Armani H.

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Marie Maynard Daly -submitted by Armani H.

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American Biochemist
Marie Maynard Daly was the first African-American women to earn her PhD in chemistry.

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Overcoming the dual hurdles of racial and gender bias, Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003) conducted important studies on cholesterol, sugars, and proteins. In addition to her research, she was committed to developing programs to increase the enrollment of minority students in medical school and graduate science programs.

Daly's early research included studies of the effects of cholesterol on the mechanics of the heart, the effects of sugars and other nutrients on the health of arteries, and the breakdown of the circulatory system as a result of advanced age or hypertension. Later she studied how proteins are produced and organized in the cell.

A Budding Interest in Science

Born in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York, Daly was an avid reader and was fascinated by Paul De Kruif's popular book The Microbe Hunters. She was further inspired by her father's love of science. Unfortunately, he had been forced by economic circumstances to drop out of Cornell University, where he had been pursuing a bachelor's degree in chemistry.

Daly was educated at Hunter College High School, an all-female institution, where her ambition to become a chemist was supported and encouraged. She enrolled in Queens College in Flushing, New York, as a commuting student, and graduated magna cum laude in 1942 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. The college offered her a fellowship to pursue graduate studies in chemistry at New York University while working part-time as a laboratory assistant at Queens College. In just one year she completed her master's degree.

A PhD from Columbia

Daly enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia University after working for a year tutoring chemistry students at Queens College. She also obtained funding from the university to help in her full-time study of chemistry. Under the direction of Mary L. Caldwell, who was known for her work on the important digestive enzyme amylase, Daly researched how compounds produced in the body affect and participate in digestion. The title of her dissertation was "A Study of the Products Formed by the Action of Pancreatic Amylase on Corn Starch." She was awarded her doctoral degree in 1947, only three years after enrolling in the program, and was the first African American woman to obtain a PhD in chemistry in the United States.

Career in Research and Education

After completing her doctoral degree Daly taught for two years at Howard University in Washington, DC. On receiving a grant from the American Cancer Society to support her postdoctoral research, she joined Alfred E. Mirsky, a pioneer in molecular biology, at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where for seven years she worked on the composition and metabolism of components of the cell nucleus, among other studies. Then Daly took a new position teaching biochemistry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. In 1960 she became a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she remained until her retirement in 1986.

In addition to her research Daly was committed to developing programs to increase the enrollment of minority students in medical school and graduate science programs. In 1988 she established a scholarship fund for African American science students at Queens College in honor of her father.
The information contained in this biography was last updated on November 9, 2018.

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Overcoming the dual hurdles of racial and gender bias, Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003) conducted important studies on cholesterol, sugars, and proteins.

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When President Donald Trump paid a visit to the National Institutes of Health last March, the leads at the vaccine research center explained their life-saving mission. The key to that mission was a 34-year-old doctor named Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.

"I was just there telling the task force about the work that we've been doing," Corbett told "CBS This Morning: Saturday" co-host Michelle Miller.

Two weeks after the visit, Corbett's team began the first stage of clinical trials. She said they took a lot of the knowledge they have gained in the last six years and applied it to a vaccine platform in collaboration with Moderna. The vaccine rolled out 10 months later.

"The vaccine teaches the body how to fend off a virus, because it teaches the body how to look for the virus by basically just showing the body the spike protein of the virus" she explained. "The body then says 'Oh, we've seen this protein before. Let's go fight against it.' That's how it works."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, credited Corbett during a webinar for her work.

"The vaccine you are going to be taking was developed by an African American woman and that is just a fact," Fauci said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 6.5 million Americans have received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. That number is expected to grow daily, though it is well behind what public health experts were hoping to see.

Corbett's interest in science started from an early age, but she never knew the difference she would make.

"To be honest, I didn't realize the level of impact that my visibility might have... I do my work because I love my work," Corbett said.

One opportunity in her life made a key difference. She attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore, as a Meyerhoff Scholar, an aggressive program that mentors minorities and women in science. Graduates of the program include Surgeon General Jerome Adams.

Dr. Freeman Hrabowski has been president at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, for nearly 30 years. He said Corbett had a strong science background but the way she was able to talk to people separated her from the rest.

"She was definitely going to make it in life," Hrabowski said. "We need more scientists who can connect to people. She could do that when she was 17, easily... What we do at UMBC is to support students of color, Black, but also students in general, to make sure they make it in science."

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 18% of all students graduate with a STEM degree, among 2% are black - something Hrabowski believes needs to change.

"It's important for people to see people looking like them, like themselves, who can be involved. If it's about women, or if it's about Blacks because it shows that you've got people who understand what you've gone through."

Dr. Barney Graham and Corbett have worked together for over 15 years. Graham is not only her mentor. He's also Corbett's boss as deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center.

"When you recognize somebody has special qualities, you need to do things that can keep those other things out of the way and avoid some of the dismissiveness that often happens not only to minority people but to women," Graham said.

Historically that bias strikes not just professionals in the field but those they serve. In 1931, scientists conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, a study by the Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute. It examined the progression of syphilis by letting infected Black men go untreated, with no regard to the suffering it caused.

Another example often cited is the removal of special cells of Henretta Lacks, a Baltimore, Maryland, cancer patient. In 1951, a research team at Johns Hopkins University removed Lacks' cells without her permission and used them in medical research worth billions of dollars. Lacks died of cancer and her family was never compensated.

"There are many other examples of supposedly objective scientists who were caring about everyone, who valued people of color less... It's a painful truth," Hrabowski said.

Corbett's understanding of the socio-cultural issues and her knowledge of science has made her an influential person in the scientific community.

In a time where vaccine skepticism is high among African Americans, Corbett hopes Black people will put faith in the vaccine and faith in the scientists working behind the scenes to bring it to the American people.

"Number one is that I get it. And then number two is to really take advantage of the level of transparency that we are attempting... even I haven't even seen before, such as FDA hearings and briefings being broadcast online, and data coming out almost instantly," she said.

As for Dr. Hrabowski, he believes Corbett deserves all the visibility she can get.

"She cannot be a hidden figure," he said. "She needs to be in textbooks. Little girls need to see her - of all races. This is what's possible."

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Meet the Black female scientist at the forefront of COVID-19 vaccine development

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When President Donald Trump paid a visit to the National Institutes of Health last March, the leads at the vaccine research center explained their life-saving mission. The key to that mission was a 34-year-old doctor named Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.

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Have you ever had a dream of what you wanted to do in life? How about a wish that you hoped every day would come true? Were you ever truly inspired by something or someone at an early age that shaped the course of your life? Living a lifelong dream does not come to many, but for Dr. Mae Jemison, space travel was always an area of fascination. Space travel was her aspiration from an early age, and together with inspiration from astronaut predecessors Guy Bluford, Jr. and Sally Ride, Jemison not only achieved her goal of flying in space, but also did so as the first African American woman on September 12, 1992.

Jemison's mother was a teacher and her father, a maintenance supervisor, while she grew up in Chicago. Jemison attended the Chicago Public School System and achieved honors in math and science. Although she had the support of her family, teachers and school staff discouraged Jemison from pursuing an education in science. Speaking to a crowd of students at her Chicago alma mater, Jemison recalled the propensity of some individuals to place her in a box. "Sometimes people want to tell you to act or to be a certain way. Sometimes people want to limit you because of their own limited imaginations." She attended Stanford University at the age of 16 and earned her bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering and African American Studies. She went on to receive her medical degree from Cornell University and served two years in the Peace Corps in West Africa as a staff physician. Her responsibilities there included managing the health care delivery system for the Peace Corps and the U.S. Embassy in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Her background includes research in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, reproductive biology, and a Hepatitis B and rabies vaccine. In the wake of the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy, Jemison left her private medical practice in Los Angeles and applied to become an astronaut candidate. She was one of 15 chosen from a pool of 2,000 applicants in 1988. She completed the intensive training, eventually being assigned to STS-47, a Spacelab Life Sciences mission. On this eight-day flight Jemison served as a science mission specialist and carried out experiments on the effects of space motion sickness, frog fertilization in space, and bone loss during spaceflight. The astronauts often bring along small personal mementos. Jemison chose several that were special to her: a flag from the Organization of African Unity, an Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority banner, and proclamations from the Chicago Public School System and the DuSable Museum of African American History. Despite all of her achievements, and the fact that Jemison has served as an astronaut, she still confronts institutionalized prejudice similar to what she experienced as a student in Chicago. After Jemison returned from space, Jemison visited an elementary school and the principal told her that, at his school, he planned to have male teachers inform the children about the opportunities at Space Camp since men are more knowledgeable in science. Jemison asserted that one has to be mindful of preconceived ideas and perceptions of individuals. After leaving NASA, Dr. Jemison went on to teach at Dartmouth College, formed a company that researches advanced technologies, is an active public speaker, and continues to urge students to pursue their dreams and pursue math and science. She stresses the importance of excelling in school. Because of her achievements, a school in Detroit was named in her honor, the Mae C. Jemison Academy. Dr. Jemison gladly accepted the position of role model and hoped to remind other African Americans that the sky is the limit!

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She Had a Dream: Mae C. Jemison, First African American Woman in Space

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Have you ever had a dream of what you wanted to do in life? How about a wish that you hoped every day would come true? Were you ever truly inspired by something or someone at an early age that shaped the course of your life?