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NC Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen joins Tanya Rivera to talk about the process and to answer viewer questions.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - As the state and country work to defeat COVID-19, health leaders say the COVID-19 vaccine could be the solution to help America get back to some sort of normal.

Right now, the state of North Carolina is vaccinating people by eligible group, as doses are delivered to the state from the federal government. But people have questions about the rollout process: Can we get more doses? Can things go faster? Can the state change the groups? Tuesday evening, state Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen joined Tanya Rivera to talk about how the process is going and to answer viewer questions.

Dr. Cohen says the state knows people have questions about the vaccination process, and they've tried to create tools to make the process easier. They created a help center phone line people can call to COVID-19 Vaccine Help Center: 1-888-675-4567. People can call this line to figure out their vaccine eligibility, find a place to get a vaccine shot, or ask questions about COVID-19 or the COVID-19 vaccine. People who've already received their shot can also call the helpline to ask a clinician a question.

If people prefer to find answers online, here are the key links they'll need.

The state's primary page for vaccine information is yourspotyourshot.nc.gov.

People who make an appointment or get the vaccine can expect to get an email from the CVMS or Covid Vaccine Management system. It's part of the official verification that you have received one or both of the vaccine doses

North Carolina is currently providing vaccinations to individuals in Group 1: Health care workers & Long-Term Care staff and residents; and Group 2: Anyone 65 years or older, regardless of health status or living situation.

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Answers about NC's vaccine rollout from the woman at the top

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NC Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen joins Tanya Rivera to talk about the process and to answer viewer questions. GREENSBORO, N.C. - As the state and country work to defeat COVID-19, health leaders say the COVID-19 vaccine could be the solution to help America get back to some sort of normal.

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Dasia Taylor has juiced about three dozen beets in the last 18 months. The root vegetables, she's found, provide the perfect dye for her invention: suture thread that changes color, from bright red to dark purple, when a surgical wound becomes infected.

The 17-year-old student at Iowa City West High School in Iowa City, Iowa, began working on the project in October 2019, after her chemistry teacher shared information about state-wide science fairs with the class. As she developed her sutures, she nabbed awards at several regional science fairs, before advancing to the national stage. This January, Taylor was named one of 40 finalists in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the country's oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors.

As any science fair veteran knows, at the core of a successful project is a problem in need of solving. Taylor had read about sutures coated with a conductive material that can sense the status of a wound by changes in electrical resistance, and relay that information to the smartphones or computers of patients and doctors. While these "smart" sutures could help in the United States, the expensive tool might be less applicable to people in developing countries, where internet access and mobile technology is sometimes lacking. And yet the need is there; on average, 11 percent of surgical wounds develop an infection in low- and middle-incoming countries, according to the World Health Organization, compared to between 2 and 4 percent of surgeries in the U.S.

Meet Regeneron STS 2021 finalist Dasia Taylor

Infections after Cesarean sections particularly caught Taylor's attention. In some African nations, up to 20 percent of women who give birth by C-section then develop surgical site infections. Research has also shown that health centers in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi have similar or lower rates of infection, at between 2 and 10 percent, following C-sections than the U.S., where rates range from 8 to 10 percent.

But smartphone access is markedly different. A BBC survey published in 2016 found that in Sierra Leone, about 53 percent of people own mobile phones, and about three-quarters of those owned basic cell phones, not smartphones.

"I've done a lot of racial equity work in my community, I've been a guest speaker at several conferences," says Taylor. "So when I was presented with this opportunity to do research, I couldn't help but go at it with an equity lens."

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Taylor spent most of her time after school in the Black History Game Show, a club she's been a member of since eighth grade, and attending weekly school board and district meetings to advocate for an anti-racist curriculum. For the four months leading up to her first regional science fair in February 2020, Taylor committed Friday afternoons to research under the guidance of her chemistry teacher, Carolyn Walling.

Healthy human skin is naturally acidic, with a pH around five. But when a wound becomes infected, its pH goes up to about nine. Changes in pH can be detected without electronics; many fruits and vegetables are natural indicators that change color at different pH levels.

"I found that beets changed color at the perfect pH point," says Taylor. Bright red beet juice turns dark purple at a pH of nine. "That's perfect for an infected wound. And so, I was like, 'Oh, okay. So beets is where it's at.'"

Next, Taylor had to find a suture thread that would hold onto the dye. She tested ten different materials, including standard suture thread, for how well they picked up and held the dye, whether the dye changed color when its pH changed, and how their thickness compared to standard suture thread. After her school transitioned to remote learning, she could spend four or five hours in the lab on an asynchronous lesson day, running experiments.

A cotton-polyester blend checked all the boxes. After five minutes under an infection-like pH, the cotton-polyester thread changes from bright red to dark purple. After three days, the purple fades to light gray.

Working with an eye on equity in global health, she hopes that the color-changing sutures will someday help patients detect surgical site infections as early as possible so that they can seek medical care when it has the most impact. Taylor plans to patent her invention. In the meantime, she's waiting for her final college admissions results.

"To get to the Top 40, this is like post-doctoral work that these kids are doing," says Maya Ajmera, the president and CEO of the Society for Science, which runs the Science Talent Search. This year's top prizes went to a matching algorithm that can find pairs in an infinite pool of options, a computer model that can help identify useful compounds for pharmaceutical research and a sustainable drinking water filtration system. The finalists also voted to grant Taylor the Seaborg Award, making her a spokesperson for their cohort.

Kathryn Chu, the director of the Center for Global Surgery at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, focuses on improving equitable access to surgical care. "I think it is amazing that this young high school scientist was inspired to work on a solution to address this problem," the surgeon writes in an email. "A product that could detect early [surgical site infections] would be extremely valuable."

However, she adds, "how this concept could translate from the bench to the bedside needs further testing."

Current suture threads are good at their job: they're affordable, they're not irritating on the skin, and they are strong enough to hold a wound together. The beet juice-dyed thread will need to be competitive on all of these attributes. Surgical site infections can also occur below the surface of a wound-a C-section involves cutting through, and then repairing, not just the skin but also the muscle underneath. As it stands, the color-changing suture thread wouldn't help detect an infection below the skin, and "if the infection oozes through the skin, or involves the skin, the infection has already reached later stages," writes Chu.

Lastly, the same non-absorbency that makes standard suture thread hard to dye with beet juice also keeps bacteria out, and vice versa. While cotton thread's braided structure gives it the ability to pick up the beet dye, it also provides a hiding place for bacteria that cause infections.

Taylor has been pursuing a line of research since the beginning of her project that might counteract the risks posed by using cotton.

"I read some studies that said beet juice was antibacterial. And although I want to take their word, I wanted to try it for myself. I wanted to reproduce their results," says Taylor.

But studying bacteria requires specific, sterile practices that neither Taylor, nor her mentors Walling and Michelle Wikner, both chemistry teachers, were initially familiar with. In the months leading up to the Science Talent Search competition, Taylor connected with microbiologist Theresa Ho at University of Iowa to create a research plan incorporating the proper techniques, and that work is ongoing.

Reflecting on the science fair experience, Taylor most wants to thank Carolyn Walling for encouraging her to participate. "We're kind of basking in all of this together," she says, especially because it's her first year doing independent research. She's also thankful for the support of her community.

"I have so much school pride because when somebody in our school does something great, they're celebrated to its fullest extent," says Taylor. "And being able to be one of those kids has been so amazing."

After graduation, Taylor hopes to attend Howard University, study political science and eventually become a lawyer.

"I am looking forward to seeing how Dasia uses this project moving forward," says Ajmera. "And on a long-term scale, I'm really interested in watching what problems she is going to continue to solve, to make the world a better place."

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This High Schooler Invented Color-Changing Sutures to Detect Infection

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After winning a state science fair and becoming a finalist in a national competition, Dasia Taylor now has her sights set on a patent

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3m young scientist challenge winner is anika chebrolu

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who won for a coronavirus discovery - cnn

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This 14-year-old girl won a $25K prize for a discovery that could lead to a cure for Covid-19

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As scientists around the world race to find a treatment for the coronavirus, a young girl among them stands out.

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Less than 30 percent of the world's researchers are women, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. However, one team fighting against COVID-19 is not only leading the charge to save lives, but also in empowering women in science, encouraging the next generation of girls and young women to pursue STEM education.

At biotechnology company Allied BioScience, chief science officer Maha El-Sayed, Ph.D., leads a female-dominated team of researchers, and their work has the potential to be a game-changer in the fight against COVID-19 and other future viruses. Their product, SurfaceWise2, continuously kills 99.9 percent of viruses, including, most importantly, the virus that causes COVID-19.

"When it comes to women in STEM, there's a lot of untapped potential. It's my hope that our team can inspire young women to pursue careers in science, and inspire other research teams to bring more talented women into the fold and elevate them to positions where they can drive real change," says Dr. El-Sayed.

As Dr. El-Sayed explains, human coronaviruses can persist on inanimate surfaces such as plastic, glass, fibers and metals for up to nine days. This makes it critical to protect high-traffic facilities where the contamination of surfaces is continuous, such as schools, stadiums, restaurants, offices and retail spaces. More advanced than comparative products in reducing chemical and disinfectant exposure, SurfaceWise2 was proven in independent studies conducted by infectious disease experts to be effective against Human Coronavirus 229E, the EPA-approved surrogate, demonstrating the ability to successfully protect against COVID-19. It's the first such product to be EPA-approved.

So how is it used? Compatible with virtually all surfaces, SufaceWise2 is applied via an electronic spray for efficient, complete and uniform treatment. Droplets are small - 900 times smaller than an average droplet - and applied at a force of 75 times greater than gravity, causing a "wraparound effect," and a natural force of attraction between the sprayed droplets and target surfaces. Once applied, the long-lasting antiviral coating physically breaks down the cells of bacteria and viruses that land on treated surfaces, effectively and continuously killing them without giving the bacteria a chance to mutate and build up resistance.

Despite its potency, this solution is very safe for humans, even in enclosed spaces. Non-toxic, non-irritating, odorless and containing no chemicals that produce harmful vapors or gases, it's already used by airlines, hospitality and travel companies, and in healthcare spaces. In the coming months, Dr. El-Sayed and her team expect to see further use in professional sporting facilities, restaurant dining rooms, offices, schools and other spaces.

As the nation fights to safely reopen, the work of dedicated, female scientists is making a vital difference in saving lives and in helping businesses, communities and families return to normalcy. To learn more about the work and achievements of Dr. El-Sayed and her team, visit www.surfacewise.com.

"Shedding light on the scientific achievements of women, particularly at this critical time in history, is essential to inspiring the next generation of girls and young women to pursue STEM education and careers in science," says Dr. El-Sayed.

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The Women Leading the Fight Against COVID-19 - The Washington Informer

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Less than 30 percent of the world's researchers are women, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. However, one team fighting against COVID-19 is not only leading the charge to save lives, but also in empowering women in science, encouraging the next generation of girls and young women to pursue STEM education.

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Chemistry of Cookies Anyone else doing some extra baking while at home? There's actually A LOT of science happening when you bake. Check out the latest STEM Like a Girl lesson about the chemistry of cookies and enjoy a sweet treat!

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Chemistry of Cookies Anyone else doing some extra baking while at home? There's actually A LOT of science happening when you bake. Check out the latest STEM Like a Girl lesson about the chemistry of cookies and enjoy a sweet treat!

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I founded the Girls in Science Program, in the fall of 2019, because I wanted girls of all ages to have a place where they can explore their love for the STEM fields while seeing examples of women who look like themselves.

~Elizabeth Poku '20 ♥

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Beyond Curie-a design project celebrating women in STEM

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Beyond Curie-a design project celebrating women in STEM

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Beyond Curie is a design project that highlights badass women in science, technology, engineering + mathematics.

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Although often uncredited, June Almeida discovered coronaviruses in 1966 using a scanning electron microscope.

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In 1966, she used a powerful electron microscope to capture an image of a mysterious pathogen - the first coronavirus known to cause human disease.

June Almeida in 1963 at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. In her day she gained a reputation for "extending the range of the electron microscope to new limits." Credit... Norman James/Toronto Star, via Getty Images

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
With no money to pay for college in post-World War II Scotland, 16-year-old June Almeida took an entry-level job in the histology department of a Glasgow hospital, where she learned to examine tissue under a microscope for signs of disease. It was a fortuitous move, for her and for science.

In 1966, nearly two decades later, she used a powerful electron microscope to capture an image of a mysterious pathogen - the first coronavirus known to cause human disease.

Almeida had just been recruited to St. Thomas' Hospital in London, where she received a virus known as B814 from British scientists who were studying the common cold. The scientists, led by David Tyrrell, knew there was something different about the virus. Though volunteers infected with B814 didn't get the sore throats typical of most head colds, they experienced unusual feelings of malaise. And the virus was neutralized by fat solvents, which meant that unlike the average cold virus, B814 had a lipid coating.

Still, without an image of the virus, the scientists could learn only so much.

Hearing about Almeida's expertise from a colleague, Tyrrell shipped specimens to her that had been infected with B814, as well as well-known flu and herpes viruses, which would serve as controls.

Though he had been told she was "seemingly extending the range of the electron microscope to new limits," Tyrrell wasn't optimistic. It was generally believed that the electron microscope could detect virus only in purified, concentrated samples. These specimens were anything but.

Almeida, however, was confident, Tyrrell recalled in his book "Cold Wars: The Fight Against the Common Cold" (2002), written with Michael Fielder. "She claimed she would be able to find virus particles in our organ cultures with her new improved techniques," he wrote. "It was worth a try."

The results, he wrote, "exceeded all our hopes. She recognized all the known viruses, and her pictures revealed the structures beautifully. But, more important, she saw virus particles in the B814 specimens!"

The only remaining problem was figuring out what to call the new virus. Influenza-like sounded a bit feeble, Tyrrell wrote. The images of B814 revealed that the virus was surrounded by a kind of halo, like a solar corona. The coronavirus was born.

From her own unpublished research and the work of others, Almeida immediately recognized that B814 was related to the infectious bronchitis virus, which causes serious disease in chickens. But until the emergence of SARS in 2002 and now Covid-19, coronavirus was largely seen as posing little threat to people.

"Not much was made of it," said Kenneth McIntosh, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, who, as an investigator at the National Institutes of Health, discovered another coronavirus around the same time Almeida did her research. "It was just the common cold. Not a big deal."

June Dalziel Hart was born on Oct. 5, 1930, in Glasgow. Her father, Harry Leonard Hart, was a bus driver; her mother was Jane (Steven) Dalziel. After her stint as a laboratory technician in Glasgow, Almeida took a similar position at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London.

In 1954 she married Enriques Rosalio Almeida, an artist, and the couple immigrated to Canada; the marriage ended in divorce.

The move to Canada proved lucky. In the late 1950s, Almeida found greater opportunity there than in London for people without college degrees.

She found work as an electron microscopy technician at the Ontario Cancer Institute (now Princess Margaret Cancer Centre), a new research center in Toronto. There she mastered a technique called negative staining, in which a heavy metal, typically phosphotungstic acid, was used to heighten the contrast in the images. She would use this method to detect the coronavirus.

In the 1960s, detecting virus in tissue samples was painstaking work. Samples were often cluttered with cellular debris, and virus particles were few and far between. Examining a single sample could take hours.

"It took attention to detail, not just with the eyes, but preparing the materials, everything had to be exactly right," McIntosh said in a telephone interview. "Attention to detail, patience and persistence. June Almeida had those qualities in spades."

One reward for her effort was the chance to see something no human had ever seen. Conveying a sense of wonder, she began a 1963 journal article about the symmetrical structure of viruses with an ode to electron microscopy - and an apology to the poet William Blake.
"Virus, virus shining bright, In the phosphotungstic night, What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fivefold symmetry."
After several years in Canada, Almeida accepted the offer from St. Thomas' Hospital and returned to London. In 1967, she moved to the Royal Postgraduate Medical School. She finished her career at Wellcome Research Laboratories, where she worked on vaccines and diagnostics.

Almeida died in Bexhill, England, on Dec. 1, 2007. She was 77.

By then many textbook chapters and virology articles featured the finely detailed images she produced. She was also better known for her other accomplishments, including capturing the first image of the rubella virus and identifying the structure of the virus that causes hepatitis B.

She also perfected a technique called immune electron microscopy, in which antibodies are used to clump viruses, making them easier to identify.

Almeida passed her methods on to other virologists, who used them to make important discoveries. Among those she trained was Albert Kapikian, who used immune electron microscopy at the National Institutes of Health to discover the norovirus, a stomach bug that accounts for about half of all food-borne illness.

In retirement, Almeida trained as a yoga instructor. She also traded antiques and learned china restoration with her husband, Philip Gardner, who was the inventor of a method to rapid diagnose viral infections. (Gardner died in 1994.)

In the late 1980s, she returned to St. Thomas' Hospital as an adviser, applying her expertise with negative staining to help produce some of the first high-quality photographs of H.I.V. made with an electron microscope.

"True to form," her daughter, Joyce, wrote in The British Medical Journal in 2008, "she could not leave electron microscopy forever."

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Overlooked No More: June Almeida, Scientist Who Identified the First Coronavirus

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In 1966, she used a powerful electron microscope to capture an image of a mysterious pathogen - the first coronavirus known to cause human disease. Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

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A 15-year-old Colorado high school student and young scientist who has used artificial intelligence and created apps to tackle contaminated drinking water, cyberbullying, opioid addiction and other social problems has been named Time Magazine's first-ever "Kid of the Year."

Gitanjali Rao, a sophomore at STEM School Highlands Ranch in suburban Denver who lives in the city of Lone Tree, was selected from more than 5,000 nominees in a process that culminated with a finalists' committee of children, Time for Kids reporters and comedian Trevor Noah.

Rao told The Associated Press in a Zoom interview from her home Friday that the prize is "nothing that I could have ever imagined. And I'm so grateful and just so excited that we're really taking a look at the upcoming generation and our generation, since the future is in our hands."

Time said in a statement that, along with Nickelodeon, it wanted to recognize "the rising leaders of America's youngest generation" in making the award. For 92 years, Time has presented a "Person of the Year," and the youngest ever was Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was 16 when she graced the magazine's cover last year.

Time said Rao stood out for creating a global community of young innovators and inspiring them to pursue their goals. Rao insists that starting out small doesn't matter, as long as you're passionate about it.

Rao's innovating started early. At age 12, she developed a portable device to detect lead in water.

She's created a device called Epione that diagnoses prescription opioid addiction at an early stage. She's also devised an app called Kindly that uses artificial intelligence to help prevent cyberbullying. It allows teens to type in a word or phrase to find out if the words they're using are bullying and lets them decide to edit what they're sending or to proceed.

"And currently, I'm looking back at water, looking at moving things like parasitic compounds in water and how we can detect for that," Rao said after a day's remote schooling.

She told actress, activist and Time contributing editor Angelina Jolie in a Zoom interview that her science pursuits started early as a way to improve social conditions. The drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, inspired her work to develop a way to detect contaminants and send those results to a mobile phone, she said.

"I was like 10 when I told my parents that I wanted to research carbon nanotube sensor technology at the Denver Water quality research lab, and my mom was like, "A what?" Rao told Jolie. She said that work "is going to be in our generation's hands pretty soon. So if no one else is gonna do it, I'm gonna do it."

The sensor technology involves molecules of carbon atoms that can detect chemical changes, including chemicals in water.

Rao has partnered with rural schools; museums; science, technology, engineering and mathematics organizations; and other institutions to run innovation workshops for thousands of other students.

In a world where science is increasingly questioned or challenged, Rao insisted that its pursuit is an essential act of kindness, the best way that a younger generation can better the world. Science and technology are being employed as never before to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, global warming and a host of other issues, she noted.

"We have science in everything we're involved in, and I think that's the biggest thing to put out there, that science is cool, innovating is cool, and anybody can be an innovator," Rao said. "Anybody can do science."

Time was planning a Kid of the Year broadcast special at 7:30 p.m. EST (5:30 p.m. MST) on Nickelodeon.

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Student scientist and inventor Gitanjali Rao is Time Magazine's first "Kid of the Year"

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A 15-year-old Colorado high school student and young scientist who has used artificial intelligence and created apps to tackle contaminated drinking water, cyberbullying, opioid addiction and other social problems has been named Time Magazine's first-ever "Kid of the Year."

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Wow! Elizabeth has created such an amazing program which I am so excited and honored to continue! I love science and working in collaboration with my community. Our future is uncertain, but it is still filled with so many amazing opportunities which I can't wait to explore with everyone.

~Lily Thornton '24 💙

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Tiera Guinn '17--whose name is Latin for "earth"--majors in aeronautics and astronautics. At 22 years old, she is already a Rocket Structural Design and Analysis Engineer for the Space Launch System being built by Boeing for NASA. The MIT senior designs and analyzes parts of a rocket she believes will be one of the biggest and most powerful in history. Guinn is set to graduate from MIT with a 5.0 in 2017.

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22-year-old Tiera Guinn already works with NASA (2017)

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Tiera Guinn '17--whose name is Latin for "earth"--majors in aeronautics and astronautics. At 22 years old, she is already a Rocket Structural Design and Analysis Engineer for the Space Launch System being built by Boeing for NASA. The MIT senior designs and analyzes parts of a rocket she believes will be one of the biggest and most powerful in history.

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To empower young girls, to inspire a love for STEM, to create future leaders.

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A Mighty Girl's top picks of children's books about real-life women of science and fictional stories about girls who love science!

We don't always think about it, but every child is a scientist! From the moment she pushes a spoon off her high chair to see what happens or starts asking, "why?" to everything, she's started on a long and exciting lifetime of discovery. As time goes on, though, kids can be discouraged from this natural interest and come to believe that science is too complicated for kids -- so it's especially important to nurture that spirit of curiosity from a young age!

One great way to encourage a child's interest in science is by showing them role models of kids - particularly girls - in STEM fields. In fictional stories, they can see faces that match their own: kids who are turning their ingenious minds to investigating questions and solving problems using the scientific method. And, through non-fiction, they can learn about curious children just like them who grew up to make amazing scientific discoveries.

To that end, in this blog post, we've shared many of our favorite books about girls and women who love science, engineering, and math! In the first part of the post, you can discover many fictional stories about curious, inventive Mighty Girls, while in the second part, you'll find many inspiring books about real-life female scientists. From beautifully illustrated picture books to fascinating teen biographies, these titles show the importance of scientific curiosity and celebrate the scientific progress that we owe to women in science both past and present. They're the perfect choice to inspire budding young scientists!

And, for science toys and kits to further support her interests, we've shared many recommendations in two blog posts, Wrapped Up In Science: Top Science Toys for Mighty Girls and Building Her Dreams: Building and Engineering Toys for Mighty Girls.

True Stories: Biographies About Real-Life Female Scientists

Unbridled Curiosity: Stories About Girls Who Love Science

One of the great things about science is that it encourages the natural curiosity and wonder that kids have! These stories show how that drive to understand fosters scientific investigation... even if things don't always go as planned.

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Ignite Her Curiosity: 70 Books to Inspire Science-Loving Mighty Girls

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A Mighty Girl's top picks of children's books about real-life women of science and fictional stories about girls who love science! We don't always think about it, but every child is a scientist! From the moment she pushes a spoon off her high chair to see what happens or starts asking, "why?"

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Dr. Marylyn Addo is working to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.

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This week, the world laid eyes on an image that previously it was thought was unseeable.
Black hole picture captured for first time in space breakthrough
The first visualisation of a black hole looks set to revolutionise our understanding of one of the great mysteries of the universe. And the woman whose crucial algorithm helped make it possible is just 29 years old.

Dr Katie Bouman was a PhD student in computer science and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when, three years ago, she led the creation of an algorithm that would eventually lead to an image of a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, some 55m light years from Earth, being captured for the first time.

The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex)
IMAGE: Reaction of Katie Bouman, who led the creation of an algorithm to produce first image of black hole. pic.twitter.com/SyFsBejXHP

Bouman was among a team of 200 researchers who contributed to the breakthrough, but on Wednesday, a picture of her triumphantly beaming as the image of the black hole materialised on her computer screen went viral, with many determined that Bouman's indispensable role was not written out of history - as so often has been the case for female scientists and researchers.

The data used to piece together the image was captured by the Event Horizon telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile. Bouman's role, when she joined the team working on the project six years ago as a 23-year-old junior researcher, was to help build an algorithm which could construct the masses of astronomical data collected by the telescope into a single coherent image.

Though her background was in computer science and electrical engineering, not astrophysics, Bouman and her team worked for three years building the imaging code. Once the algorithm had been built, Bouman worked with dozens of EHT researchers for a further two years developing and testing how the imaging of the black hole could be designed. But it wasn't until June last year, when all the telescope data finally arrived, that Bouman and a small team of fellow researchers sat down in a small room at Harvard and put their algorithm properly to the test.
Female Nobel prize winner deemed not important enough for Wikipedia entry
With just the press of a button, a fuzzy orange ring appeared on Bouman's computer screen, the world's first image of a supermassive black hole, and astronomical history was made. In a post on social media, Bouman emphasised the collaborative efforts that had made the imaging of the black hole possible.

"No one algorithm or person made this image, it required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat," said Bouman. While their discovery was made in June, it was only presented to the world by all 200 researchers on Wednesday.

Bouman, who is currently a post-doctoral fellow at MIT, is due to take up a post as an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, but intends to keep working with EHT.

Speaking in a 2016 TED talk, Bouman said: "I'd like to encourage all of you to go out and help push the boundaries of science, even if it may at first seem as mysterious to you as a black hole."
Topics

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mit - massachusetts institute of technology

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Katie Bouman: the 29-year-old whose work led to first black hole photo

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This week, the world laid eyes on an image that previously it was thought was unseeable. Black hole picture captured for first time in space breakthrough The first visualisation of a black hole looks set to revolutionise our understanding of one of the great mysteries of the universe.

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In the spirit of the Wheeler Mission Statement, our program is designed to link Upper School, Middle School, and Lower School girls and help them learn their powers in the context of STEM and be answerable for their use. This program was created in response to the experiences girls have in their STEM courses. Upper School girls will have opportunities to deepen their interests in STEM while engaging in STEM-themed activities and talks with Middle School girls. We hope to help girls of all ages find their voices in STEM and inspire them to pursue STEM classes, clubs, and careers.

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The Nobel Prize | Women who changed science

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Nobel Prize in Physics 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1911

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Kizzmekia Corbett is leading a team that is working to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

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The day President Donald Trump went to the National Institutes of Health for an update on progress toward a vaccine for COVID-19, many of those who sat behind the presidential seal with him were white men well known in the worlds of science, medicine and, now, national anxiety control: vaccine and infectious disease specialists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. John Mascola, Dr. Barney Graham and the man who led the human genome project, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH. Sitting next to Graham was Kizzmekia Corbett, an NIH research fellow.

In 2003, Fauci said at the event, NIH scientists managed to identify SARS and get a vaccine to stage-one clinical trials in 20 months. Now a team of scientists led by Corbett, 34, was poised to move to first-stage trials for a coronavirus vaccine - this time, in about two months.

That was March 3. Just 122 people had tested positive for the coronavirus in the U.S. Reporters stationed around the edges of the room asked the president about virus-related travel bans and his Super Tuesday predictions. No one asked Corbett - whom Collins had just described as a "wonderfully talented young scientist in our midst," as well as the only woman and black person at the table - a single thing.

Just 13 days later, Corbett's team began first-stage clinical trials of a COVID-19 vaccine, the first of its kind in the world and the fastest progress ever toward a possible vaccine for a novel pathogen. At least 40 distinct groups of researchers in China, Germany, the U.S. and other countries soon followed. But if Corbett's team is successful - meaning phase one, two and three clinical trials prove the team's work has produced a safe, working vaccine - something to prevent infection with the coronavirus could be ready for use in doctors' offices by early to mid-2021. COVID-19 could become a preventable disease.

"There was, and is, already a fair amount of pressure," Corbett said. "A lot of people are banking on us or feel that we have a product that could, at least, be part of the answer this world needs. And, well, whew, just saying that out loud is not easy."

There are other statements that Corbett expresses with ease, however. Take, for instance, when Graham met her 12 years ago, when she was an undergraduate doing summer work at the NIH's Vaccine Research Center, and asked her what she ultimately wanted to do with her life.

"She said, 'I want your job,'" Graham recalls. "From the very beginning, she was really pretty bold in her aspirations. And I, if I recall correctly, I was just glad to hear help was coming."
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Corbett was clear that her route included getting a doctorate and ideally working on rapid vaccine development - an aria to Graham's ears. Rapid vaccine development, particularly for novel pathogens with the potential to create pandemics but not big corporate profits, almost always requires singular focus and scientists willing to sacrifice.

Corbett stuck to the plan: majoring in biology and sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and dividing her time between lab and field work on health outcomes in diverse communities. Corbett earned a doctorate from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2014.

Now she's a fellow at Graham's center leading the coronavirus vaccine development team.

"She's not your average pocket-protector scientist," said Andrew Ward, a professor at Scripps Research, an independent research and graduate education institution. Ward, who specializes in structure-based vaccine design and atomic-level modeling, is part of Corbett's team.

"There's pressure, constant pressure, in a situation like this where the speed at which we've gone to clinical trials is almost unprecedented," Ward said. "And I think there's a lot of realism on the team that this is a shot, maybe not even our best shot, but a good shot, given the pressing need. And Kizzy, to me, really epitomizes that. She's putting in long, long hours, doing critical, potentially world-altering work, at what is naturally a pretty high-pressure time in her career, in this incredibly focused way."

Ralph Baric, a professor in the departments of epidemiology, microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina, calls Corbett "a really quite outstanding, hard-working scientist."

"Fate has put her in a position to make a huge difference in human health, and it has made a good choice," said Baric, who has spent 35 years studying coronaviruses and evaluated Corbett's doctoral research on dengue fever. He is part of Corbett's vaccine development team conducting critical experiments.

"Corbett seemed drawn to dengue research for two reasons: the suffering the disease causes and the complexity making vaccine development challenging," Baric said. "In retrospect, it was solid preparation for COVID-19."

Corbett turned her attention to coronaviruses when she joined the NIH's Vaccine Research Center as a postdoctoral fellow in 2014.

" SARS and MERS, two coronaviruses, had already caused massive outbreaks," she said. "And these big, challenging questions remained, along with the fact that it was clear that it could happen again. It was looming out there and just a matter of time."

Working for Graham, Corbett was deep into her exploration of coronaviruses when COVID-19 emerged last year.

Corbett and members of her team had identified a particular "spike protein" in coronaviruses like COVID-19 that sticks out from the virus' surface. The claw-like shape permeates healthy human cells, infecting them. Building on decades of research by many scientists, the potential NIH vaccine uses a genetic code sequence known as messenger RNA, or mRNA, to prompt the body's immune system to react when the spike protein is detected, blocking the infection process.

On March 3, that's the science that Corbett explained to Trump during his NIH tour.

Fauci, Corbett and Graham donned lab coats and moved the president through a warren of working labs with whirring machines crunching data, displaying or analyzing 3D models of the virus and freezers with the capacity to store samples at minus-80 degrees.

Corbett declined to comment on the president's relationship with science. But that day at the NIH, she said, Trump listened and asked smart questions.

Three days later, Trump signed a bill authorizing an $8.3 billion emergency coronavirus response, which included at least $3 billion for development of testing, vaccine and treatment.

Along with all that scientific devotion, Corbett remains connected to other parts of life, capable of talking about science anywhere from "the trap house to the White House," she said in an interview with Black Enterprise magazine. It is one of the many blogs, podcasts, social media platforms and various news outlets with largely black audiences that have devoted time to Corbett's scientific work and background.

In the days before strict social distancing measures took hold, Corbett told her Twitter followers that she got an "emergency weave" and had her eyebrows sculpted. She's since joked about having to put on a real shirt to hop on a work videoconference call.

Corbett is a scientist who loves Jesus, hates mercenary operations falsely claiming they have produced a coronavirus shield from household spices and worries about how seriously people - especially at churches on Easter - take social distancing recommendations.

In a rare moment of levity since clinical trials of her team's possible vaccine began, Corbett joked that rappers Young Jeezy and DaBaby will be asked to perform should she ever win a Nobel Prize.

"She's brilliant and doing this complicated work and yet, somehow, is also this person who manages to remember everybody's birthday," Ward said. "She's really great at bringing together groups of people with different skills and understanding the value and contributions of each of them in ways that really maximizes scientific impact."

Corbett was born in Hurdle Mills, North Carolina, a town of less than 4,000 people about 30 minutes south of the Virginia border. Everyone thinks their baby is special, especially their first baby, said her mother, Rhonda Brooks.

"Kizzie was always like a little detective," Brooks said. "My sweet little, opinionated detective."
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Brooks also recalls when Corbett's third grade teacher, a black woman, told her and her husband, Corbett's stepfather, that they should do everything possible to make sure their daughter was put on the most demanding academic track - something the district rarely considered for black children. They should push, the teacher said.

Eventually, the family moved 20 minutes south to Hillsborough, where Brooks raised her math whiz daughter just like her six other birth, step and foster kids.

When it was time for college, Corbett had multiple offers, including from a college known as a Southern party school and another from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she was accepted to the Meyerhoff Scholars Program and offered a full scholarship.

"It was like, do I go for the fun or do I go for the funds?" she said. "I chose Meyerhoff because of the money, the network and the program. Critical thought is just how I roll."

In terms of the coronavirus alone, Meyerhoff Scholars is also the program that produced Olubukola Abiona, a scientist preparing for graduate studies working under Corbett at the NIH's Vaccine Research Center; Jerome Adams, surgeon general of the United States and part of the White House's coronavirus task force; and Darian Cash, a senior scientist at Moderna, a biotech firm and part of the scientific group working with Corbett. All three are black.

"That is not and cannot be a coincidence," said Keith Harmon, director of the Meyerhoff Scholars program, who was one of Corbett's advisers in college. The program has helped to make the school the predominantly white institution producing the nation's largest number of African Americans who earn medical and doctoral degrees.

"When I think about Kizzy, I'm not at all surprised she's one of the scientists on the edge of a vaccine," Harmon said. "Not one bit. What I am reminded of is that there is such ability, untapped, unrecognized and un-nurtured among students, all our students, particularly among our underrepresented minority students. And if we accept that as normal, you really have to wonder what serious challenges we leave unsolved."

The work itself is exhilarating and hard. Right now, it also demands seven-day workweeks and getting three to four hours of sleep each night. Information is constantly arriving at all hours. Decisions need to be made. There are so many calls, emails and requests for data, for samples, for tests that measure how well the virus has been blocked that Corbett jokes she needs someone just to read her email.

Yet she manages it all - while also trying to digest side helpings of disrespect.

In meetings and emails or on conference calls at least a few times every day, Corbett said, some scientists around the world double-check her work or ideas with Graham or direct questions to him - even though Graham makes it consistently clear that Corbett is the scientific lead and the ultimate expert. Corbett said they thank Graham when she answers their questions or provides data, samples and tests.

On Twitter, someone recently suggested that she should " go back to McDonalds where she belongs."

Corbett has a few coping strategies. She has a boss who believes in her, so she's not afraid to ask questions, seek direction or try new approaches. She's so organized that she's known as "the spreadsheet queen" who plots out everything from clinical trials to her best friends' children's birthdays.

She tries to engage fully with the issue before her. Corbett makes time to check in with her three nieces and nephews almost every day. She leans on family and friends, especially her two grandmothers, for whom "Jesus is like a bff," she said. And she extracts confidence, scientific and social information from doing the work.

"At some point, you have to decide how much to care," Corbett said. "You understand that your work will have to be mighty so that it can do your speaking."

CORRECTION (April 12, 2020, 9:45 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a scientist working for Kizzmekia Corbett. She is Olubukola Abiona, not Olubukula Ablona.

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The woman leading COVID-19 vaccine trials is 'not your average pocket-protector scientist'

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The day President Donald Trump went to the National Institutes of Health for an update on progress toward a vaccine for COVID-19, many of those who sat behind the presidential seal with him were white men well known in the worlds of science, medicine and, now, national anxiety control: vaccine and infectious disease specialists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. John Mascola, Dr. Barney Graham and the man who led the human genome project, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH.

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After the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in Iceland in 2010, flight cancellations left Miranda Cheng stranded in Paris. While waiting for the ash to clear, Cheng, then a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University studying string theory, got to thinking about a paper that had recently been posted online. Its three coauthors had pointed out a numerical coincidence connecting far-flung mathematical objects. "That smells like another moonshine," Cheng recalled thinking. "Could it be another moonshine?"

She happened to have read a book about the " monstrous moonshine," a mathematical structure that unfolded out of a similar bit of numerology: In the late 1970s, the mathematician John McKay noticed that 196,884, the first important coefficient of an object called the j-function, was the sum of one and 196,883, the first two dimensions in which a giant collection of symmetries called the monster group could be represented. By 1992, researchers had traced this farfetched (hence "moonshine") correspondence to its unlikely source: string theory, a candidate for the fundamental theory of physics that casts elementary particles as tiny oscillating strings. The j-function describes the strings' oscillations in a particular string theory model, and the monster group captures the symmetries of the space-time fabric that these strings inhabit.

By the time of Eyjafjallajökull's eruption, "this was ancient stuff," Cheng said - a mathematical volcano that, as far as physicists were concerned, had gone dormant. The string theory model underlying monstrous moonshine was nothing like the particles or space-time geometry of the real world. But Cheng sensed that the new moonshine, if it was one, might be different. It involved K3 surfaces - the geometric objects that she and many other string theorists study as possible toy models of real space-time.

By the time she flew home from Paris, Cheng had uncovered more evidence that the new moonshine existed. She and collaborators John Duncan and Jeff Harvey gradually teased out evidence of not one but 23 new moonshines: mathematical structures that connect symmetry groups on the one hand and fundamental objects in number theory called mock modular forms (a class that includes the j-function) on the other. The existence of these 23 moonshines, posited in their Umbral Moonshine Conjecture in 2012, was proved by Duncan and coworkers late last year.

Meanwhile, Cheng, 37, is on the trail of the K3 string theory underlying the 23 moonshines - a particular version of the theory in which space-time has the geometry of a K3 surface. She and other string theorists hope to be able to use the mathematical ideas of umbral moonshine to study the properties of the K3 model in detail. This in turn could be a powerful means for understanding the physics of the real world where it can't be probed directly - such as inside black holes. An assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam on leave from France's National Center for Scientific Research, Cheng spoke with Quanta Magazine about the mysteries of moonshines, her hopes for string theory, and her improbable path from punk-rock high school dropout to a researcher who explores some of the most abstruse ideas in math and physics. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

QUANTA MAGAZINE: You do string theory on so-called K3 surfaces. What are they, and why are they important?

MIRANDA CHENG: String theory says there are 10 space-time dimensions. Since we only perceive four, the other six must be curled up or "compactified" too small to see, like the circumference of a very thin wire. There's a plethora of possibilities - something like 10 ⁵⁰⁰ - for how the extra dimensions might be compactified, and it's almost impossible to say which compactification is more likely to describe reality than the rest. We can't possibly study the physical properties of all of them. So you look for a toy model. And if you like having exact results instead of approximated results, which I like, then you often end up with a K3 compactification, which is a middle ground for compactifications between too simple and too complicated. It also captures the key properties of Calabi-Yau manifolds [the most highly studied class of compactifications] and how string theory behaves when it's compactified on them. K3 also has the feature that you can often do direct and exact computations with it.

What does K3 actually look like?

You can think of a flat torus, then you fold it so that there's a line or corner of sharp edges. Mathematicians have a way to smooth it, and the result of smoothing a folded flat torus is a K3 surface.

So you can figure out what the physics is in this setup, with strings moving through this space-time geometry?

Yes. In the context of my Ph.D., I explored how black holes behave in this theory. Once you have the curled-up dimensions being K3-related Calabi-Yaus, black holes can form. How do these black holes behave - especially their quantum properties?

Absolutely. You can ask about the information paradox or properties of various types of black holes, like realistic astrophysical black holes or supersymmetric black holes that come out of string theory. Studying the second type can shed light on your realistic problems because they share the same paradox. That's why trying to understand string theory in K3 and the black holes that arise in that compactification should also shed light on other problems. At least, that's the hope, and I think it's a reasonable hope.

Do you think string theory definitely describes reality? Or is it something you study purely for its own sake?

I personally always have the real world at the back of my mind - but really, really, really back. I use it as sort of an inspiration for determining roughly the big directions I'm going in. But my day-to-day research is not aimed at solving the real world. I see it as differences in taste and style and personal capabilities. New ideas are needed in fundamental high-energy physics, and it's hard to say where those new ideas will come from. Understanding the basic, fundamental structures of string theory is needed and helpful. You've got to start somewhere where you can compute things, and that leads, often, to very mathematical corners. The payoff to understanding the real world might be really long term, but that's necessary at this stage.

Have you always had a knack for physics and math?

As a child in Taiwan I was more into literature - that was my big thing. And then I got into music when I was 12 or so - pop music, rock, punk. I was always very good at math and physics, but I wasn't really interested in it. And I always found school insufferable and was always trying to find a way around it. I tried to make a deal with the teacher that I wouldn't need to go into the class. Or I had months of sick leave while I wasn't sick at all. Or I skipped a year here and there. I just don't know how to deal with authority, I guess.

And the material was probably too easy. I skipped two years, but that didn't help. So then they moved me to a special class and that made it even worse, because everybody was very competitive, and I just couldn't deal with the competition at all. Eventually I was super depressed, and I decided either I would kill myself or not go to school. So I stopped going to school when I was 16, and I also left home because I was convinced that my parents would ask me to go back to school and I really didn't want to do that. So I started working in a record shop, and by that time I also played in a band, and I loved it.

How did you get from there to string theory?

Long story short, I got a little bit discouraged or bored. I wanted to do something else aside from music. So I tried to go back to university, but then I had the problem that I hadn't graduated from high school. But before I quit school I was in a special class for kids who are really good in science. I could get in the university with this. So I thought, OK, great, I'll just get into university first by majoring in physics or math, and then I can switch to literature. So I enrolled in the physics department, having a very on- and off-again relationship to it, going to class every now and then, and then trying to study literature, while still playing in the band. Then I realized I'm not good enough in literature. And also there was a very good teacher teaching quantum mechanics. Just once I went to his class and thought, that's actually pretty cool. I started paying a bit more attention to my studies of math and physics, and I started to find peace in it. That's what started to attract me about math and physics, because my other life in the band playing music was more chaotic somehow. It sucks a lot of emotions out of you. You're always working with people, and the music is too much about life, about emotions - you have to give a lot of yourself to it. Math and physics seems to have this peaceful quiet beauty. This space of serenity.

Then at the end of university I thought, well, let me just have one more year to study physics, then I'm really done with it and can move on with my life. So I decided to go to Holland to see the world and study some physics, and I got really into it there.

You got your master's at Utrecht under Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft, and then you did your Ph.D. in Amsterdam. What drew you in?

Working with ['t Hooft] was a big factor. But just learning more is also a big factor - to realize that there are so many interesting questions. That's the big-picture part. But for me the day-to-day part is also important. The learning process, the thinking process, really the beauty of it. Every day you encounter some equations or some way of thinking, or this fact leads to that fact - I thought, well, this is pretty. Gerard is not a string theorist - he's very open-minded about what the correct area of quantum gravity should be - so I got exposed to a few different options. I got attracted by string theory because it's mathematically rigorous, and pretty.

With the work you're doing now, aside from the beauty, are you also drawn to the mystery of these connections between seemingly different parts of math and physics?

The mystery part connects to the bad side of my character, which is the obsessive side. That's one of the driving forces that I would call slightly negative from the human point of view, though not the scientist point of view. But there's also the positive driving force, which is that I really enjoy learning different stuff and feeling how ignorant I am. I enjoy that frustration, like, "I know nothing about this subject; I really want to learn!" So that's one motivation - to be at this boundary place between math and physics. Moonshine is a puzzle that might require inspirations from everywhere and knowledge from everywhere. And the beauty, certainly - it's a beautiful story. It's kind of hard to say why it is beautiful. It's beautiful not the same way as a song is beautiful or a picture is beautiful.

What's the difference?

Typically a song is beautiful because it triggers certain emotions. It resonates with part of your life. Mathematical beauty is not that. It's something much more structured. It gives you a feeling of something much more permanent, and independent of you. It makes me feel small, and I like that.

What is a moonshine, exactly?

A moonshine relates representations of a finite symmetry group to a function with special symmetries [ways that you can transform the function without affecting its output]. Underlying this relationship, at least in the case of monstrous moonshine, is a string theory. String theory has two geometries. One is the "worldsheet" geometry. If you have a string - essentially a circle - moving in time, then you get a cylinder. That's what we call the worldsheet geometry; it's the geometry of the string itself. If you roll the cylinder and connect the two ends, you get a torus. The torus gives you the symmetry of the j-function. The other geometry in string theory is space-time itself, and its symmetry gives you the monster group.

If or when you find the K3 string theory underlying the 23 umbral moonshines, what would the moonshines buy you in terms of new ways that you can study K3 string theory?

We don't know yet, but these are educated guesses: To have a moonshine tells you that this theory has to have an algebraic structure [you have to be able to do algebra with its elements]. If you look at a theory and you ask what kind of particles you have at a certain energy level, this question is infinite, because you can go to higher and higher energies, and then this question goes on and on. In monstrous moonshine, this is manifested in the fact that if you look at the j-function, there are infinitely many terms that basically capture the energy of the particles. But we know there's an algebraic structure underlying it - there's a mechanism for how the lower energy states can be related to higher energy states. So this infinite question has a structure; it's not just random.

As you can imagine, having an algebraic structure helps you understand what the structure is that captures a theory - how, if you look at the lower energy states, they will tell you something about the higher energy states. And then it also gives you more tools to do computations. If you want to understand something at a high-energy level [such as inside black holes], then I have more information about it. I can compute what I want to compute for high-energy states using this low-energy data I already have in hand. That's the hope.

Umbral moonshine tells you that there should be a structure like this that we don't understand yet. Understanding it more generally will force us to understand this algebraic structure. And that will lead to a much deeper understanding of the theory. That's the hope.
This article was reprinted on Wired.com.

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Moonshine Master Toys With String Theory | Quanta Magazine

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After the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in Iceland in 2010, flight cancellations left Miranda Cheng stranded in Paris. While waiting for the ash to clear, Cheng, then a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University studying string theory, got to thinking about a paper that had recently been posted online.

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We are celebrating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on the ClubX Blog! Be sure to read Part 1 of this series for information on the BGCA STEM Challenge. Get those prizes!
STEM can be intimidating for adults, let alone young girls. But when it's presented in an approachable way, it's much easier to see how exciting and valuable STEM really is. Luckily, there are plenty of great resources that do just that. Today's post features lists of movies and books that highlight women in STEM. In each category, one resource includes a few discussion questions to get you started! Click the titles for trailers or purchase links.

Note: It isn't just important for girls to learn about the history of women in STEM or to see women featured in those roles. When boys see women participating in STEM, it can help break down prejudice and normalize the concept that STEM is for everyone. So while you should certainly use these resources in girl-only groups, consider using them with your youth as a whole as well.
Movies
Hidden Figures (PG): Hidden Figures shares the lesser-known story of three black female mathematicians who worked at NASA during the space race. Despite their superior intelligence and capabilities, they faced constant doubt and discrimination. The inspiring film shows their perseverance and contributions to aeronautics.

Discussion Questions:

How were Katherine, Mary and Dorothy challenged by discrimination? How did they succeed anyway?

How has the experience of women working in STEM changed since the 1960s?

Mary said "someone has to be first" as she was working to earn her engineering degree. Why is being first at something both exciting and scary?

When did you notice people standing up for Katherine, Mary and Dorothy? Why was it important for them to have male supporters?

What would you do if you were told you could not pursue a career or job because of how you look or who you are?

Black Panther (PG-13): Ok, so you may already be familiar with this massive blockbuster of 2018 (Wakanda Forever!) But this one's worth a second watch (or third or fourth) to see women portrayed as the leaders in technology and innovation. Black Panther wouldn't be who he is without the inventiveness of Princess Shuri!

The Imitation Game (PG-13): During World War II, cryptographers were enlisted to help crack the code of German machines to intercept Nazi messages. While this was mostly a man's world, Joan Clarke plays a key role in the code-breaking operation that ultimately deciphered the encrypted communication. This film also features LGBTQ themes.

Wonder Park (PG): This is a great one to look forward to! As a young girl, June imagined a massive amusement park with amazing rides and talking animals. As she grew older, she lost that sense of imagination until she found the park, Wonderland, had come to life in the woods. This comes out March 15 th and would make a great trip to the movies.

: This documentary follows girls ages 10-18 from around the world who enter the Technovation Challenge in Silicon Valley. They use technology and teamwork to solve problems and improve situations in their communities. Seeing girls their own age in this kind of environment can make STEM approachable for young female viewers.
Books for Elementary-Aged Youth
Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty: Rosie is determined to create a flying machine for her Great-Aunt Rose, but when she tests her invention, it crashes. She learns that it wasn't a failure because she didn't give up. This book teaches perseverance and also includes pieces of aviation history. Plus it is part of a series!

Discussion Questions:

What are some words you would use to describe Rosie? How did her personality change throughout the book?

Why do you think Rosie hid all her machines and inventions at the beginning of the book?

Have you ever had an idea for something you wanted to invent? What was it?

Why was Rosie so discouraged when she built the airplane for Rose? What did Aunt Rose say to make her feel better?

Have you ever felt discouraged when something you wanted to make didn't turn out the way you planned? What did you do next?

Grace Hopper, Queen of Computer Code by Laurie Wallmark: Grace Hopper was a pioneer in computer programming and "taught" computers to speak English. This book introduces girls to the world of coding and the possibilities that go along with it.

Ada Lace, On the Case by Emily Calandrelli: Ada is a 3rd grade scientist and inventor. In her latest adventure, part of a series, Ada uses her homemade gadgets and knowledge of science to investigate the dognapping of her neighbor's Yorkie. This title is part of a series!

The Girl Who Thought in Pictures: The Story of Dr. Temple Grandin by Julia Finley Mosca: This rhyming book tells the story of Temple Grandin, who was diagnosed with autism and used her visual thinking to study animal science. It includes a biography, fun facts and a note from Temple. This book is part of a series about Amazing Scientists.

11 Experiments That Failed by Jenny Offill & Nancy Carpenter: Failure is part of experimentation and this book takes a humorous approach to showing just that. Along the way, it teaches the scientific method while asking questions like "can a kid make it through the winter eating only snow and ketchup."

Girls Think of Everything by Catherine Thimmesh: This book highlights the versatility of science and the wide impact it can have on the everyday world. Examples range from windshield wipers to the chocolate chip cookie to show the contributions women have made to science.
Books for Older Youth and Teens
by Julie Chibbaro: A young adult historical fiction novel, Deadly tells the story of the typhoid fever outbreak and Typhoid Mary. The story follows the 16-year-old narrator, Prudence, as she assists in a lab to investigate the illness and uncover its cause. Here are some discussion questions:

What stereotypes of women during that time do you see in the girl's school? Why do you think Prudence wants "a job that's meaningful?"

What are some characteristics Prudence has that would make her a good scientist?

How is the work she does with Mr. Soper different from working as a doctor?

What are some of the challenges Prudence has to face as a female scientist? What are some challenges all scientists face?

by Hope Jahren: This memoir by geochemist and geobiologist, Hope Jahren, uses the anatomy of a plant as a metaphor for her life (the "Roots and Leaves" section describes her childhood.) She describes her experiences while also addressing the larger issues of gender equality in the scientific field.

by Laurie Halse Anderson: The novel's focus is Kate, a high school senior who excels at subjects like chemistry and calculus. The periodic table is used as a comparison to her organized and logical lifestyle, but Kate must learn to adapt when she faces obstacles in her personal and academic life.

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Debra Bogart: The story itself, which takes place in Texas in 1899, centers on 11-year-old Calpurnia, who works with her grandfather, a naturalist, to understand why yellow and green grasshoppers are different sizes. The bigger picture speaks to the challenges historically faced by female scientists and how they were overcome. This funny novel also has a sequel!

by Gretchen McNeil: High school student Josie thinks she's found an escape from her problems at home and at school when her dreams of a girl named Jo turn out to be a parallel universe. But when she discovers that life in the alternative universe isn't as perfect as it seems, she needs to figure out a way to unseal the portal to get back home.

Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan: This book about a 12-year-old genius combines messages about family, being different, and coping with grief. The main character has a passion for nature and diagnosing medical conditions, but has trouble connecting with others until an event forces her to step outside of her comfort zone.

What are your favorite movies or books that feature women in STEM? How do you integrate literacy and STEM? Tell us your best ideas in the comments below, on the BGCA Youth Development Facebook page, or at ClubXBlog@bgca.org to share with the Movement!

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16 Books and Movies Featuring Women in STEM - With Discussion Questions!

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We are celebrating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on the ClubX Blog! Be sure to read Part 1 of this series for information on the BGCA STEM Challenge. Get those prizes! STEM can be intimidating for adults, let alone young girls. But when it's presented in an approachable way, it's much...

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Elizabeth Fischer and her team took images of the novel coronavirus.

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There's a famous photo of Annie Easley. She's standing next to a huge control panel with dials, lights, buttons from floor to ceiling. She looks like a character in a movie, commanding a fearless space mission. But it's real: it was taken in 1981 in the Central Control Room of NASA's Lewis Engine Research Building in Cleveland, Ohio, as part of a profile on Easley for a feature story in Science and Engineering Newsletter. Although Easley never had a movie made of her life, she was a hidden figure in her own right as a barrier-breaking mathematician and rocket scientist who worked on countless NASA projects for over 30 years.

Annie Jean Easley was born in 1933 and raised by her single mother in Birmingham, Alabama. She lived there until she left for college at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Easley started off studying pharmacy. "I just thought it would be fascinating," she said in a NASA oral history interview. "Now, it may have something to do with going to the corner drugstore, where they had all of the candy and the ice cream."

Easley left school and briefly returned home to Birmingham in 1945. When she first registered to vote in Alabama, she was subjected to a Jim Crow-era poll tax and a test on Alabama's history. She used her college background to help others overcome the onerous voting restrictions.

NASA

She married and moved with her husband to Cleveland to be near his family. Once there, she found out that the only pharmacy school in the area had closed. So she had to look elsewhere for work. In the newspaper she read a story about a pair of twin sisters who worked as "computers," performing mathematical computations for the engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), a forerunner to modern NASA (the same NACA that Hidden Figure Katherine Johnson worked at in Virginia). It sounded interesting, and she'd always been good at math. So the next day she drove to NACA, at what was then called the Lewis Research Station, and applied for a job. Two weeks later she was working there.

Initially she worked as a computer, in similar roles to Johnson and the twins she'd read about. But Easley was an eclectic, multi-talented mathematician. When computers (the machines, not the humans) came about, she learned assembly language and FORTRAN and became a programmer. She worked on batteries, including studies on battery-powered vehicles similar to modern hybrid cars. She worked on shuttle launches that measured destruction of ozone and helped test and design the NASA nuclear reactor at Plum Brook.

Matteo Farinella

Her most famous work was on the Centaur rocket. The Centaur was a first-of-its-kind rocket, using a unique fuel system, and its legacy endures to this day. When Surveyor 1, the first American space probe to land on an extraterrestrial body, landed on the moon, it was powered by a Centaur rocket. A Centaur launched the Cassini probe to Saturn. When NASA's InSight spacecraft lands on Mars, it will have gotten there using an Atlas V-401 rocket, a modern iteration of the Centaur.

Though she stayed for over 30 years at NASA, having "more good memories than bad," she was clear-eyed about the racial discrimination she experienced. She related a story of being photographed, along with her co-workers, for NASA promotional photographs. She was humiliated to find that, no matter where the photos were used, she was cut out of them. She was denied financial aid that NASA gave to other employees to pay for additional college courses. No reason was given. "Still, that is not enough to deter me from my life goals," she later said. "You keep going, because there are people who have authority, and I think sometimes they abuse it. But it makes them think, 'I'm in charge if I say no.'"

Easley retired from NASA in December 1989. She skied, played tennis, and volunteered. She worked part-time in real estate and occasionally tutored. She passed away in 2011. Reflecting on her life and the obstacles she overcame, she said, "I think of the poem, 'Mother to Son' [by Langston Hughes] "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair" but you got to keep struggling."

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Meet Annie Easley, the barrier-breaking mathematician who helped us explore the solar system

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11" x 14", printed on matte paper Shop now There's a famous photo of Annie Easley. She's standing next to a huge control panel with dials, lights, buttons from floor to ceiling. She looks like a character in a movie, commanding a fearless space mission.

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Searching for kid-friendly science experiments to do at home? Whether you're prepping for a fifth-grade science fair or want something fun to do with preschoolers, these cool science experiments for kids are super easy and a lot of fun for kids of all ages. Parents may end up learning a new thing or two, too!

Children are born scientists. They're always experimenting with something, whether they're throwing a plate of spaghetti on the wall, blowing bubbles in the bathwater, or stacking blocks into an intricate tower only to destroy it in one big swipe. Happily, you can do some pretty mind-blowing, hands-on science experiments at home using stuff you probably have lying around the house.

Want even more science experiments for kids like this? Check out our list of 25 Preschool Science Experiments, and more, in our Guide to Science Experiments for Kids, which is packed with fun STEM activities.

Popular KiwiCo, Green Kid Crafts, and Mel Chemistry subscription boxes send age-appropriate projects every month, so you never run out of science experiments you can do at home.

Coolest Science Experiments for Kids at Home

1. Make rock candy

Learn about the crystallization process by learning how to make rock candy in a glass.

2. Make a lava lamp

Make a lava lamp by pouring vegetable oil into water and then adding an Alka-Seltzer tablet to make the blob of oil move.

3. Make homemade slime

Borax plus glue equals homemade slime.

4. Frozen bubbles

Blow bubbles outside when temperatures dip to the single digits and watch them freeze.

5. Invisible Ink

Use lemon juice to make invisible ink that can only be seen when held up to a heat source.

6. Walking rainbows

Use food coloring and water to make a walking rainbow and explore how combining primary colors makes secondary colors.

7. Paper towel art/magic

This paper towel art magic trick, which also involves science for an added bonus. Permanent and washable markers make art and teach about solubility at the same time.
RELATED: 1000s of Boredom Busters for Kids
8. Pepper and soap experiment

Dish soap, pepper, a toothpick, and a little bit of water are all kids need to feel like science wizards. Watch a little drop of soap chase pepper away in the pepper and soap experiment.

9. Balloon carbon dioxide experiment

Create carbon dioxide and hang on while you use it to fill up a balloon.

10. Skittles science experiment

Learn about a phenomenon called water stratification, using Skittles as the subject matter. Perfect for after Halloween!

Fun Science Experiments Using Household Staples

11. Marshmallow catapult

Build a marshmallow catapult out of a plastic spoon, rubber bands, and Popsicle sticks.

12. Make a parachute for toys

Use a plastic bag and cup to build a parachute for a light toy.

13. Dye flowers with food coloring

Place white flowers in colored water and watch how they soak up the hues.

RELATED: 50 Magna-Tiles Games and Building Ideas for Kids

14. Baking soda lemon juice experiment

Create a colorful and fizzy reaction by adding a drop of food coloring and a little baking soda to a sliced lemon.

15. Make homemade butter

Make your own butter by shaking a jar of heavy cream.

16. Homemade ice cream in a bag

Make homemade ice cream in a bag: shake salt, ice, cream, and sugar vigorously until the consistency is right, then enjoy.

17. Do oil and water mix?

Plop oil into water to see that they really don't mix; try it with a variety of liquids to make a rainbow of stripes.

RELATED: 25 Exercise Games to Do with Kids Indoors

18. Egg in a bottle experiment

Force an egg to fit into a bottle by creating a suction using heat.

19. Floating eggs

Change how an egg floats or sinks in a glass by adding salt to the water.

20. Turn milk into plastic

Turn milk into a material that acts like plastic using white vinegar.

21. Thriving yeast experiment

Mix a batch of bread dough and separate it into several different bowls; place them in different places (outside, inside, in the dark, in the light) to see which environment yeast thrives in.

22. How does mold grow?

Grow mold on bread by putting slices in different environments (in a bag in the dark, in a bag in the sunlight, out in the open, in the refrigerator); see which one gets moldy first.

23. The taste-smell connection

Have your kids close their eyes and hold their noses and see if they can still identify foods by taste.

24. Make easy homemade cheese
RELATED: 75 Indoor Activities for Kids for Rainy Days
Dabble in some kitchen science while making this yummy ricotta cheese.

25. Make an eggshell disappear

Your egg will be so embarrassed when you leave it naked! Dissolve the shell right off an egg by simply placing it in a cup of vinegar.

26. Make a taste bud map

Map taste buds by dipping Q-tips into different flavors and placing them on different areas of your tongue.

27. Find the fatty food with a simple trick

Explore the fat content of different foods by wiping them on a brown paper bag; fatty foods leave behind a greasy spot, while fruits and vegetables leave no trace at all.

Slime, Putty, and Oobleck Science Experiments for Kids

28. Silly putty recipe

You will be squeaky clean after creating this satisfying non-sticky putty by simply combining cornstarch and dish soap.

29. Easy Oobleck recipe

Whip up some Oobleck, a fascinating non-Newtonian fluid that can act like a solid or a liquid depending on certain conditions.

30. Ivory soap in microwave

Microwave Ivory soap (or any soap that floats) to create a bizarre puffy soufflé.

Outdoor and Nature Science Experiments

31. Grow beans

Grow a bean in a clear cup to watch the roots grow down and the stem grow up.

32. Make a duck call/whistle from a straw

Craft a duck call by cutting the ends of a straw into a point, then blow.

33. Musical bottles

Set up a row of bottles with varying amounts of liquid and then blow across the openings to hear the different tones.

34. How to make a sundial

Make a sundial by placing a stick in a vertical position and a circle of rocks around it marking each hour.

35. Cut ice cubes like magic

Cut ice in half using a fishing wire-the pressure melts the ice faster than the air.

36. Make a rainbow

Make a rainbow by holding a glass of water up to the sunlight with a sheet of paper behind it to catch the colors.

37. Tornado in a bottle

Create a tornado in a bottle by taping two plastic bottles together neck to neck-one filled, the other empty-and swirling it quickly.

38. How to make a solar oven

S'more science, please! Harness the power of the sun and turn a pizza box into a solar oven and roast some delicious treats for the whole family.

Science Experiments for Kids that Fizz, Bubble, and Foam

39. Baking soda volcano science project

Mix baking soda, vinegar, and glitter for a sparkly volcano.

40. Diet Coke and Mentos

Mix Diet Coke and Mentos and stand back to watch the explosion. (Really! Stand back.)

41. Pop Rocks and soda

Drop Pop Rocks into a bottle of soda and then place a balloon onto the opening to watch it inflate.

42. What will shine a penny?

Discover how to keep your pennies shiny by experimenting with different cleaning solutions.

43. How to make elephant toothpaste

Make " elephant toothpaste" (a.k.a. an impressive large foam) out of soap, yeast, and hydrogen peroxide. For the holidays, turn it into " reindeer toothpaste."

44. Glitter germ experiment

This glitter does more than shine, it sparks a scientific experiment to see how far germs can spread.

45. Dancing popcorn experiment

Baking soda and vinegar react to make popcorn kernels hop around a jar of water.

46. Fizzy chalk fireworks with sidewalk chalk

This STEM activity adds some sizzle to your summertime sidewalk chalk using just a few basic ingredients: baking soda, cornstarch, food coloring, and vinegar.

Physics and Physical Science Experiments for Kids

47. Milk and food coloring experiment

Learn about surface tension by dropping food coloring into milk and watch as the colors move when you add some soap.

48. Rube Goldberg machine for kids

Make a Rube Goldberg machine featuring a series of moving pieces that affect one another: marbles, dominoes, books, and most any surface.

49. Balloon rocket car

Build a rocket balloon car using a Styrofoam tray, a balloon, and a straw; watch how air pressure moves it across the table.

50. Dominant eye / dominant hand

Looking for hands-on science experiments? Ask your kids to do simple tasks with their hands, feet, and eyes (like grab a ball, stand on one foot, or wink) to see which side is dominant.

51. Reaction time test

Test your reaction time by having a friend drop a ruler between two almost closed fingers. See how fast you can grab it.

52. Soap boats

Explore the scientific concept of density while taking a bath. Ivory soap boats do more than just float, they demonstrate density.

RELATED: 40 Snow Day Boredom Busters for Kids

53. Paper cup tower activity

Engineer a tall tower using red party cups and sheets of paper. How high can you go?

54. Best paper airplane design

Fold a paper airplane and then bend a corner to see how that changes its flight path.

55. Blind spots

Find your blind spot by moving a card with a speck on it until you can no longer see the spot.

56. Build a miniature windmill

Build a miniature windmill using a few simple objects. Watch it spin faster or slower based on the direction of the "blades."

57. Simple energy transfer experiment

Bounce a ball on top of another to watch how the energy transfers to the top ball and leaves the bottom one "dead."

58. Easy centripetal force experiment

Demonstrate centripetal force by spinning a bucket of water on a rope in a vertical circle.

More Easy Science Experiments for Kids

59. Egg drop project

Build a container for an egg that protects it from breaking and then test it out by dropping it from on high.

60. How to make a bouncy ball

Fashion your own bouncy balls with this recipe to see how various shapes bounce differently.

61. Balloon speakers

Use a balloon to amplify sound by holding it to your ear.

62. Shaving cream cloud experiment

Budding meteorologists can create shaving cream storm clouds and Technicolor raindrops.

63. Balloon static electricity

Make static electricity by rubbing balloons on clothing or shuffling on the carpet with socks, then zap someone with a quick touch.

64. Gummy bear science experiment

These gummies won't be so yummy in your tummy, but you can watch gummy bears grow by placing them in water, salt water, and vinegar.

65. Make a periscope

Build your own periscope using a milk container and carefully angled mirrors that allow you to see things above or behind you.

66. Fingerprint science experiment

Be a DIY spy with this fun fingerprint experiment. Collect fingerprints using one of these methods, and then dive a little deeper with a forensic study of fingerprint patterns.
This article may contain some affiliate links, which means we might earn a small commission if you make a purchase. There is no extra cost to the reader. We only recommend products and services that we have personally used or have thoroughly researched. This article was first published in 2014, but it has since been updated. Additional reporting and photos by Ally Noel except where noted.
67. Expanding ice experiment

Fill a plastic bottle to the brim with water and put it in the freezer; in a few hours, the bottle will crack because ice expands.

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67 Easy Science Experiments for Kids To Do at Home

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Searching for kid-friendly science experiments? These easy science experiments use household products, food, and other items you probably have on hand.

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"She embodies the ideal of public health: highly intelligent, focused, compassionate, strategic and extremely effective," says one of her many admirers, Terrie Fox Wetle, founding dean of Brown University's School of Public Health.

PROVIDENCE - Together with the governor, she has become a voice of authority in the coronavirus pandemic. Almost every day, Rhode Islanders see her at the news briefings that have become the tie binding us in this time of staying home.

Those who best know Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott, the state Department of Health director, say they are not surprised at her command, composure and leadership of a branch of government that has never been more important.

Those who do not may want to discover how she arrived at this most somber moment.

An African American, Alexander-Scott is the daughter of a businessman and a woman originally from Virginia whose teachers pushed her to vocational school "because of where she was from and the color of her skin," the director told The Journal in a 2015 interview. But her mother wanted health care, and after completing college night courses, she became a nurse. She earned a master's degree and eventually was named nursing director at a hospital in New York.

The daughter determined to follow the adamant mother.

TO OUR READERS: This content is being provided for free as a public service during the coronavirus outbreak. Sign up for our daily or breaking newsletters to stay informed. Please support local journalism by subscribing to The Providence Journal.

Alexander-Scott majored in Human Development and Family Studies at Cornell University's College of Human Ecology, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1997. She was a dean's list student and a member of the Mortar Board National Honor Society.

In 2001, she earned her MD from SUNY Upstate Medical University, in Syracuse, New York. Again, she won distinction, receiving the James L. Potts Medical Principles Award, named for a professor who "was a strong advocate for minority students on campus," according to the school. The award "is presented annually to a graduating African-American medical student who excels in clinical medicine and makes contributions to the community," the school says.

It was a stellar start to a medical career.

In 2005, Alexander-Scott completed a four-year residency in the Internal Medicine/Pediatrics Combined Program at University Hospital at Stony Brook, in New York.

That year, she came to Rhode Island to begin a four-year infectious disease fellowship at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Her appointments during this time included those at Hasbro Children's, Rhode Island, The Miriam and Women & Infants - hospitals in the state's two largest health-care systems, Lifespan and Care New England.

Dr. Michael Fine, her predecessor as Health Department director, recalled her during those days.

"I first met Dr. Alexander-Scott when she was a resident and I was in practice when she gave a world-class talk at Pediatric Grand Rounds at Rhode Island Hospital that blew me out of the water for its salience and precision," Fine told The Journal.

Robin Neale, Care New England's director of clinical effectiveness and infection prevention, has similar memories.

"I met Director Scott in 2007, when she was Dr. Alexander, pediatric infectious-disease physician," Neale told The Journal. "Her passion for public health was evident back then as we worked together to change the law for prenatal HIV testing in Rhode Island. Dr. Alexander led that effort to make HIV testing a routine prenatal test, changing consent from opt-in to opt-out."

That effort resulted in a new state law in 2007 that made testing for HIV a routine component of prenatal screenings.

Said Neale: "The resulting change improved the rate of HIV testing during pregnancy from 52% to 100% and provided a mechanism to identify infants at risk of 'vertical transmission' of HIV, in order to provide timely [intervention] and prevent HIV infection of the newborn. She was then, and is now, a fierce advocate for public health, in her own gentle and thoughtful way."

Alexander-Scott reflected back on her 2007 experience in the 2015 Journal interview, saying: "That hooked me. Just being able to see how you could go from a clinical experience to helping to make a difference at a population level certainly showed me the connection and drove my passion for public health."

Alexander-Scott earned a Master of Public Health degree from Brown's Department of Community Health in 2011. On April 1, 2015, Gov. Gina Raimondo named her interim Health Department director.

Eight weeks later, the state Senate confirmed her as chief.

The vote was unanimous.

By then, her commitment to the health of all Rhode Islanders, regardless of race, income, education or neighborhood, was evident.

This commitment would become a hallmark of her tenure as head of the Health Department, which states its "three leading priorities" on its site:

"Addressing the socioeconomic and environmental determinants of health, eliminating disparities of health and promoting health equity, and ensuring access to quality health services for all Rhode Islanders, including the state's vulnerable populations."

WATCH a video of Alexander-Scott discussing her priorities and policies wit The Journal leading up to the pandemic.

The former Nicole Alexander married Michael Scott in 2013. Last year, the couple welcomed a son.

"I was thrilled to have her working at RIDOH when I was there," former director Fine said. "I've been deeply impressed by what she's been able to do there - and on the national stage, when she was president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers. How she does it while caring for a nine-month-old is beyond me."

Like Neal and Fine, Rhode Island Medical Society Board Chairman Dr. Peter Hollman praises Alexander-Scott's leadership during the COVID-19 crisis.

"Her team has been phenomenal and earned the respect and appreciation of front-line clinicians," he said. "All across the country, budget cuts have affected public health. This Department has been slimmed down over decades, yet with sheer grit, calm and intelligence, they are handing this crisis in a manner that will save lives."

Dr. John Murphy, Lifespan executive vice president and Rhode Island Hospital president, concurs. "Dr. Alexander-Scott has truly stepped up to the plate, taking on a job larger than anyone can imagine," he said. "I am grateful for her efforts on behalf of all Rhode Islanders and her leadership in an exceptionally challenging time."

Said Dr. James E. Fanale, Care New England president and CEO:

"Dr. Alexander-Scott has proven her tremendous value as a leader during the coronavirus pandemic. Her constant, confident and open communication style brings comfort to all the health system leadership. Nicole's availability alone has demonstrated her commitment to all of us."

Terrie Fox Wetle, founding dean of Brown's School of Public Health, who has known Alexander-Scott for many years, agrees.

"She embodies the ideal of public health: highly intelligent, focused, compassionate, strategic and extremely effective," Wetle said. "I can think of no one who could do a better job in providing public health leadership during this time of crisis in Rhode Island. I am grateful for the work that she is doing and I know that her efforts are saving lives."

Questions and Answers about coronavirus.

gwmiller@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7380

On Twitter: @gwaynemiller

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Front and center: Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott

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"She embodies the ideal of public health: highly intelligent, focused, compassionate, strategic and extremely effective," says one of her many admirers, Terrie Fox Wetle, founding dean of Brown University's School of Public Health. PROVIDENCE - Together with the governor, she has become a voice of authority in the coronavirus pandemic.

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The Untold History of Women in Science and Technology

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Listen to women from across the Administration tell the stories of their personal heroes across the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

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Curiosity often breeds innovation, which was precisely the case with Grace Murray Hopper. As a child, she would often dismantle household electronics to see how they worked-a habit that forced her mother to limit Grace to taking apart just alarm clock. Her interest in machines and how they functioned served her well as she applied her knowledge of mathematics and physics to develop the first computers, and then to advance computer programming.

Hopper is often claimed to have coined the phrase "debugging" to refer to identifying issues in computer code.

A programmer is born

Hopper transitioned from dismantling household electronics to dismantling complex equations and theories. She chose to study mathematics and physics at Vassar College, and eventually obtained her masters and PhD in mathematics from Yale University. During her PhD, she did double-duty as a student and professor, teaching math at Vassar College during much of her PhD. She would remain on as a professor of mathematics there for over ten years.

Her transition from mathematician to programmer in 1944 was made possible through military service in the Navy Reserves. Hopper first attempted to enroll in the Navy during World War II. However, at the age of 34, standing at 5'6" and only 105 pounds, in 1940 she was considered too old and too small for active military duty-and her role as a professor of mathematics was also deemed too important to the war effort for her to leave. But Hopper was determined to serve her country, and four years later-after successfully obtaining a leave of absence as a professor and special exemption from the weight requirement, she enlisted in the Navy Reserve.

It's likely that without her fierce desire to join the military, Hopper would have remained as a professor of mathematics, and not had the opportunity to work on computers.

Hopper's first assignment placed her at Harvard, where she began work on the first Mark I computer for the Bureau of Ships Computation Project. The excitement (and no doubt challenge) of programming the world's first computers led Hopper to turn down a full professorship from Vassar to remain working at Harvard and their Computation Lab. This decision established her incredible career trajectory.

"Debugging"

U.S. Naval Historical Center via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1947, as Hopper was working on the Mark II computer at Harvard, her team discovered a moth stuck in a relay, a type of electric switch. This impeded the operation of the relay, and therefore the function of the computer itself. The remains of the moth can still be seen in the team's log at the Smithsonian. Hopper is often claimed to have coined the phrase "debugging" to refer to identifying issues in computer code. While it's a charming story, the phrase "debugging" was not used in any of the team's usage logs, and in fact, "bug" had already been in use in the engineering field for quite some time. However, it is technically true that with the moth, Hopper found the first "computer bug."

Teaching computers English

Hopper was dedicated to computer programming, and was determined to make computers easier to use. As anyone who has dabbled in computer programming can tell you, it can be hard to learn the correct commands. With the early computers Hopper was working with, it was even trickier-commands were structured as complex symbols and numbers, and even simple programming required extraordinary technical knowledge. One of Hopper's most notable accomplishments was to aid the transition of programming to something more people-friendly, through the creation of the first compiler. She also developed the first coding language, which she based primarily on English words.

"It's much easier for people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols. So I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code."

Initially, her idea to incorporate English into programming was criticized. Many people pointed out the obvious-computers can't understand English. However, Hopper was adamant, stating, "It's much easier for people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols. So I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code."

To do so, Hopper invented the first compiler, a program that translates computer code from one programming language to another. Often, this involves taking a high-level language-for example, using English words and phrases as a set of instructions-and then translates those to a low-level computing program, one rich in symbols and numbers, that a computer can understand. Having a compiler allows computers to "understand" English, and helps programmers more easily communicate with the machines they build. Hopper hoped that programming languages that relied on English would help the average user be able to access them.

Matteo Farinella

It's a simple idea, but a revolutionary one, and eventually would lead to the creation of many programming languages-user-friendly inputs that can be translated by the computer to machine-friendly outputs. Hopper herself was responsible for one main language, known as, earning her the nickname "Grandma COBOL." The program was developed in 1959, mainly for business and administrative systems to organize large information sets, and still remains the most ubiquitous programming language used in business (though now it's mainly used to maintain older systems). COBOL's widespread use can likely be attributed to the fact that Hopper developed and validated the COBOL software and its compiler counterpart for the entire Navy during her tenure as director of the Navy Programming Languages Group.

Hopper's influence and stature in the Navy was highly praised-she left Navy service with the rank of Rear Admiral, at a time when few women achieved such a high status. Her career in the Navy Reserves spanned more than 42 years, although she never was allowed into the full Navy. She eventually became the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the US Navy when she was 79 years, eight months, and five days.

"Amazing Grace"

Even though her official teaching career ended in 1943, Hopper was in demand as a speaker and consultant throughout her life. She was energetic and engaging, and fondly remembered for one particular demonstration, involving wires to simulate nanoseconds and data processing. As she so frequently was asked, "Why does satellite communication take so long?" Grace used a spool of wire to show how far light could travel in one nanosecond, and to explained how long data takes to reach a satellite (spoiler-it's a long time), which was why initially Internet speeds were so slow. Luckily for us, we've graduated from using dial-up and old copper phone lines to fancy fiber optic cables dedicated solely to Internet services, which can transmit our digital data faster. Today, Hopper would have to update her demonstration for the modern age.

Hopper's ideology and founding principles shaped computer science as we know it today. She was truly amazing.

Hopper's life successfully intertwined both military service and academic prowess, with that dash of chance that discoveries often carry. It's likely that without her fierce desire to join the military, Hopper would have remained as a professor of mathematics, and not had the opportunity to work on computers. Given her natural curiosity, this would have no doubt still led to important innovations, but her contributions to programming would have been missed. Hopper's abundance of accomplishments earned her the nickname "Amazing Grace," along with many awards ( including a post-humous Presidential Medal Freedom from Barack Obama). She was a pioneering woman in the field of computer programming and the Navy Reserves-both areas notoriously dominated by men. But Hopper's ideology and founding principles shaped computer science as we know it today. She was truly amazing.

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Rear Admiral Amazing Grace Hopper taught computers English

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Curiosity often breeds innovation, which was precisely the case with Grace Murray Hopper. As a child, she would often dismantle household electronics to see how they worked-a habit that forced her mother to limit Grace to taking apart just alarm clock.

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A Video to Watch: First All-Female Spacewalk

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A Video to Watch: First All-Female Spacewalk

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Update, 2:58 p.m. EDT: NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir have completed their spacewalk, becoming the first two women to venture outside the International Space Station at the same time. The two spacewalkers, over the course of about seven hours outside the ISS, successfully replaced a power controller that recently failed.

"Today was especially an honor, as we also recognize that this is a milestone. It symbolizes exploration by all that dare to dream and work hard to achieve that dream. Not only that, it's a tribute to those who paved the way for us to be where we are, and we hope an inspiration to all future explorers," Koch said upon reentering the space station.

Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will make history today as they step outside the International Space Station in pressure suits for the first all-female spacewalk. For five and a half hours, the two women will float outside the ISS as they work to replace a faulty power controller.

Koch and Meir were originally scheduled to install new batteries outside of the space station next Monday, but they were reassigned to replace a power controller as soon as possible after it failed last weekend, Mike Wall reports for . NASA officials said the power controller failure is a repeat of a similar problem that occurred in April, so the astronauts need to retrieve the faulty battery charge/discharge unit (BCDU) and send it back to Earth for inspection.

Koch and Meir begin their extravehicular activity (EVA), the official name for a spacewalk, at 7:50 a.m. ET on Friday morning. You can watch a livestream of their spacewalk on NASA TV above.

Koch was originally slated to conduct a spacewalk in March with fellow astronaut Anne McClain, but NASA postponed the milestone mission due to spacesuit availability. Both women preferred the fit of a medium-size spacesuit torso, but only one medium-size suit was configured for work outside of the space station, reported Jacey Fortin and Karen Zraick for the New York Times. Rather than incur the additional hours of labor and risk of prepping another spacesuit before the mission, the team decided to switch out the astronauts. Koch was instead joined by Nick Hague on an otherwise routine mission to install batteries on the ISS.

After her spacewalk with McClain didn't work out, Koch configured a second medium-size suit herself, reports Ashley Strickland for . Koch has been at the ISS since March 14 and is scheduled to return in February 2020. Her nearly yearlong mission will be the longest single spaceflight undertaken by a woman.

Today's spacewalk is Koch's third excursion outside the ISS this month and the fourth of her career, reports William Harwood for . She was the 14th woman to walk in space, and Meir becomes the 15th this morning.

The first-ever spacewalk was carried out by Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov in 1965. Almost two decades later, Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space, joined by a male cosmonaut in 1984. NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, also ventured out with a male partner later that year, so an all-female team is many years in the making.

For the women making history, though, today is just another day in space. Both Koch and Meir spoke in a video from the space station shown at a NASA media event, reports Taylor Umlauf for the Wall Street Journal.

"We don't even really think about it on a daily basis. It's just normal," Meir said in the video. "We're part of the team. It's really nice to see how far we've come."

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About Andrea Michelson

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Update, 2:58 p.m. EDT: NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir have completed their spacewalk, becoming the first two women to venture outside the International Space Station at the same time. The two spacewalkers, over the course of about seven hours outside the ISS, successfully replaced a power controller that recently failed.

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A crucial contribution. Rosalind Franklin made a crucial contribution to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, but some would say she got a raw deal. Biographer Brenda Maddox called her the "Dark Lady of DNA," based on a once disparaging reference to Franklin by one of her coworkers. Unfortunately, this negative appellation undermined the positive impact of her discovery. Indeed, Franklin is in the shadows of science history, for while her work on DNA was crucial to the discovery of its structure, her contribution to that landmark discovery is little known.

Her education. Franklin was born on July 25, 1920, in London, to a wealthy Jewish family who valued education and public service. At age 18, she enrolled in Newnham Women's College at Cambridge University, where she studied physics and chemistry. After Cambridge she went to work for the British Coal Utilization Research Association where her work on the porosity of coal became her Ph.D. thesis, and later it would allow her to travel the world as an guest speaker.

In 1946, Franklin moved to Paris where she perfected her skills in X-ray crystallography, which would become her life's work. Although she loved the freedom and lifestyle of Paris, she returned after four years to London to accept a job at King's College.

A passionate woman. Franklin worked hard and played hard. She was an intrepid traveler and avid hiker with a great love of the outdoors who enjoyed spirited discussions of science and politics. Friends and close colleagues considered Franklin a brilliant scientist and a kindhearted woman. However, she could also be short-tempered and stubborn, and some fellow scientists found working with her to be a challenge. Among them was Maurice Wilkins, the man she was to work with at King's College.

An unhappy time. A misunderstanding resulted in immediate friction between Wilkins and Franklin, and their clashing personalities served to deepen the divide. The two were to work together on finding the structure of DNA, but their conflicts led to them working in relative isolation. While this suited Franklin, Wilkins went looking for company at "the Cavendish" laboratory in Cambridge where his friend Francis Crick was working with James Watson on building a model of the DNA molecule.

Unknown to Franklin, Watson and Crick saw some of her unpublished data, including the beautiful "photo 51," shown to Watson by Wilkins. This X-ray diffraction picture of a DNA molecule was Watson's inspiration (the pattern was clearly a helix). Using Franklin's photograph and their own data, Watson and Crick created their famous DNA model. Franklin's contribution was not acknowledged, but after her death Crick said that her contribution had been critical.

On to better things. Franklin moved to Birkbeck College where, ironically, she began working on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, building on research that Watson had done before his work on DNA. During the next few years she did some of the best and most important work of her life, and she traveled the world talking about coal and virus structure. However, just as her career was peaking, it was cut tragically short when she died of ovarian cancer at age 37.

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Rosalind Franklin: A Crucial Contribution

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A crucial contribution. Rosalind Franklin made a crucial contribution to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, but some would say she got a raw deal. Biographer Brenda Maddox called her the "Dark Lady of DNA," based on a once disparaging reference to Franklin by one of her coworkers.

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In the summer of 2018, at a conference on low-dimensional topology and geometry, Lisa Piccirillo heard about a nice little math problem. It seemed like a good testing ground for some techniques she had been developing as a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin.

"I didn't allow myself to work on it during the day," she said, "because I didn't consider it to be real math. I thought it was, like, my homework."

The question asked whether the Conway knot - a snarl discovered more than half a century ago by the legendary mathematician John Horton Conway - is a slice of a higher-dimensional knot. "Sliceness" is one of the first natural questions knot theorists ask about knots in higher-dimensional spaces, and mathematicians had been able to answer it for all of the thousands of knots with 12 or fewer crossings - except one. The Conway knot, which has 11 crossings, had thumbed its nose at mathematicians for decades.

Before the week was out, Piccirillo had an answer: The Conway knot is not "slice." A few days later, she met with Cameron Gordon, a professor at UT Austin, and casually mentioned her solution.

"I said, 'What?? That's going to the Annals right now!'" Gordon said, referring to Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline's top journals.

"He started yelling, 'Why aren't you more excited?'" said Piccirillo, now a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University. "He sort of freaked out."

"I don't think she'd recognized what an old and famous problem this was," Gordon said.

Piccirillo's proof appeared in Annals of Mathematics in February. The paper, combined with her other work, has secured her a tenure-track job offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that will begin on July 1, only 14 months after she finished her doctorate.

The question of the Conway knot's sliceness was famous not just because of how long it had gone unsolved. Slice knots give mathematicians a way to probe the strange nature of four-dimensional space, in which two-dimensional spheres can be knotted, sometimes in such crumpled ways that they can't be smoothed out. Sliceness is "connected to some of the deepest questions in four-dimensional topology right now," said Charles Livingston, an emeritus professor at Indiana University.

"This question, whether the Conway knot is slice, had been kind of a touchstone for a lot of the modern developments around the general area of knot theory," said Joshua Greene of Boston College, who supervised Piccirillo's senior thesis when she was an undergraduate there. "It was really gratifying to see somebody I'd known for so long suddenly pull the sword from the stone."

Magic Spheres

While most of us think of a knot as existing in a piece of string with two ends, mathematicians think of the two ends as joined, so the knot can't unravel. Over the past century, these knotted loops have helped illuminate subjects from quantum physics to the structure of DNA, as well as the topology of three-dimensional space.

But our world is four-dimensional if we include time as a dimension, so it is natural to ask if there is a corresponding theory of knots in 4D space. This isn't just a matter of taking all the knots we have in 3D space and plunking them down in 4D space: With four dimensions to move around in, any knotted loop can be unraveled if strands are moved over each other in the fourth dimension.

To make a knotted object in four-dimensional space, you need a two-dimensional sphere, not a one-dimensional loop. Just as three dimensions provide enough room to build knotted loops but not enough room for them to unravel, four dimensions provide such an environment for knotted spheres, which mathematicians first constructed in the 1920s.

It's hard to visualize a knotted sphere in 4D space, but it helps to first think about an ordinary sphere in 3D space. If you slice through it, you'll see an unknotted loop. But when you slice through a knotted sphere in 4D space, you might see a knotted loop instead (or possibly an unknotted loop or a link of several loops, depending on where you slice). Any knot you can make by slicing a knotted sphere is said to be "slice." Some knots are not slice - for instance, the three-crossing knot known as the trefoil.

Slice knots "provide a bridge between the three-dimensional and four-dimensional stories of knot theory," Greene said.

But there's a wrinkle that lends richness and peculiarity to the four-dimensional story: In 4D topology, there are two different versions of what it means to be slice. In a series of revolutionary developments in the early 1980s (which earned both Michael Freedman and Simon Donaldson Fields Medals), mathematicians discovered that 4D space doesn't just contain the smooth spheres we intuitively visualize - it also contains spheres so pervasively crumpled that they could never be ironed smooth. The question of which knots are slice depends on whether you choose to include these crumpled spheres.

"These are very, very strange objects, that sort of exist by magic," said Shelly Harvey of Rice University. (It was at Harvey's talk in 2018 that Piccirillo first learned about the Conway knot problem.)

These strange spheres are not a bug of four-dimensional topology, but a feature. Knots that are "topologically slice" but not "smoothly slice" - meaning they are a slice of some crumpled sphere, but no smooth one - allow mathematicians to build so-called "exotic" versions of ordinary four-dimensional space. These copies of four-dimensional space look the same as normal space from a topological viewpoint but are irretrievably crumpled. The existence of these exotic spaces sets dimension four apart from all other dimensions.

The question of sliceness is "the lowest-dimensional probe" of these exotic four-dimensional spaces, Greene said.

Over the years, mathematicians discovered an assortment of knots that were topologically but not smoothly slice. Among knots with 12 or fewer crossings, however, there didn't seem to be any - except possibly the Conway knot. Mathematicians could figure out the slice status of all other knots with 12 or fewer crossings, but the Conway knot eluded them.

Conway, who died of COVID-19 last month, was famous for making influential contributions to one area of mathematics after another. He first became interested in knots as a teenager in the 1950s and came up with a simple way to list essentially all the knots up to 11 crossings (previous complete lists had gone up to only 10 crossings).

On the list was one knot that stood out. "Conway, I think, realized that there was something quite special about it," Greene said.

The Conway knot, as it came to be known, is topologically slice - mathematicians realized this amid the revolutionary discoveries of the 1980s. But they couldn't figure out whether it was smoothly slice. They suspected that it was not, because it seemed to lack a feature called "ribbonness" that smoothly slice knots typically have. But it also had a feature that made it immune to every attempt to show it was not smoothly slice.

Namely, the Conway knot has a sort of sibling - what's known as a mutant. If you draw the Conway knot on paper, cut out a certain portion of the paper, flip the fragment over and then rejoin its loose ends, you get another knot known as the Kinoshita-Terasaka knot.

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The trouble is, this new knot happens to be smoothly slice. And because the Conway knot is so closely related to a smoothly slice knot, it manages to hoodwink all the tools (called invariants) that mathematicians use to detect non-slice knots.

"Whenever a new invariant comes along, we try to test it against the Conway knot," Greene said. "It's just this one stubborn example that, it seems, no matter what invariant you come up with, it won't tell you whether or not the thing is slice."

The Conway knot "sits at the intersection of the blind spots" of these different tools, Piccirillo said.

One mathematician, Mark Hughes of Brigham Young University, created a neural network that uses knot invariants and other information to make predictions about features such as sliceness. For most knots, the network makes clear predictions. But its guess about whether the Conway knot is smoothly slice? Fifty-fifty.

"Over time it stood out as the knot that we couldn't handle," Livingston said.

Clever Twists

Piccirillo enjoys the visual intuition that knot theory entails, but she doesn't think of herself primarily as a knot theorist. "It's really [three- and four-dimensional shapes] that are exciting for me, but the study of these things is deeply linked with knot theory, so I do a bit of that too," she wrote in an email.

When she first started studying mathematics in college, she didn't stand out as a "standard golden child math prodigy," said Elisenda Grigsby, one of Piccirillo's professors at Boston College. Rather, it was Piccirillo's creativity that caught Grigsby's eye. "She believed very much in her own point of view, and always has."

Piccirillo encountered the question about the Conway knot at a time when she was pondering another way two knots can be related besides mutation. Every knot has an associated four-dimensional shape called its trace, which is made by placing the knot on the boundary of a 4D ball and sewing a sort of cap onto the ball along the knot. A knot's trace "encodes that knot in a very strong way," Gordon said.

Different knots can have the same four-dimensional trace, and mathematicians already knew that these trace siblings, so to speak, always have the same slice status - either they're both slice, or they're both not slice. But Piccirillo and Allison Miller, now a postdoctoral fellow at Rice, had shown that these trace siblings don't necessarily look the same to all the knot invariants used to study sliceness.

That pointed Piccirillo toward a strategy for proving that the Conway knot is not slice: If she could construct a trace sibling for the Conway knot, maybe it would cooperate with one of the slice invariants better than the Conway knot does.

Constructing trace siblings is a tricky business, but Piccirillo was an expert. "That's just, like, a trade I'm in," she said. "So I just went home and did it."

Through a combination of clever twists, Piccirillo managed to construct a complicated knot that has the same trace as the Conway knot. For that knot, a tool called Rasmussen's s-invariant shows it is not smoothly slice - so the Conway knot can't be either.

"It's a really beautiful proof," Gordon said. There was no reason to expect that the knot Piccirillo constructed would yield to Rasmussen's s-invariant, he said. "But it worked ... kind of amazingly."

Piccirillo's proof "fits into the mold of short, surprising proofs of elusive results that researchers in the area are able to quickly absorb, admire and seek to generalize - not to mention wonder how it took so long to come up with," Greene wrote in an email.

Knot traces are a classical tool that has been around for decades, but one that Piccirillo understood more deeply than anyone else, Greene said. Her work has shown topologists that knot traces are underappreciated, he said. "She's picked up some tools that maybe had a bit of dust on them," he said. "Others are following suit now."
Correction: May 21, 2020
The illustration depicting Piccirillo's knot has been updated to fix one of the crossings.
This article was reprinted on Wired.com and summarized on Washingtonpost.com.

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Egg Laying or Live Birth: How Evolution Chooses

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Graduate Student Solves Decades-Old Conway Knot Problem

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In the summer of 2018, at a conference on low-dimensional topology and geometry, Lisa Piccirillo heard about a nice little math problem. It seemed like a good testing ground for some techniques she had been developing as a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin.

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Brilliant, creative, and assertive, Emmy Noether helped to fine-tune the theory of general relativity and kick-started a new field of mathematics with her conceptual, abstract approach and "big picture" ideas.

Noether's revolutionary way of thinking changed our approach to mathematics and physics in the early 20th century, despite struggling throughout her life for the opportunities afforded to her male colleagues. She is perhaps the most important mathematician that you've never heard of.

Matteo Farinella

Emmy Noether was born in Erlangen, Germany in 1882 into an academically brilliant family. Her father Max was a successful mathematician, and two of her younger brothers eventually earned doctorates in chemistry and mathematics. As a child, Noether focused her studies on languages, music, and domestic duties - subjects deemed appropriate for women at the time. But after passing an examination in 1900 to teach French and English, she took the highly unusual action of studying mathematics at the University of Erlangen.

The university had only recently relaxed its ban on female students, but still only allowed women to audit classes, and only after being granted permission from their professors. In 1903, Noether passed the graduation exam at prep school in Nuremberg to earn her bachelor's in mathematics. After a brief stint as a graduate student at the University of Göttingen, Noether returned to Erlangen and eventually earned her doctorate under the supervision of Paul Gordan, widely regarded as "the king of the invariant theory" of mathematics.

...for many years Noether lectured at the University of Erlangen without a salary...

Prior to the end of the First World War, sexist university policies precluded female faculty members, and for many years Noether lectured at the University of Erlangen without a salary, sometimes substituting for her father, who taught in the mathematics department. At the same time, she published her early research on invariants, the concept that some features of mathematical objects remained constant even when that object is manipulated - a hexagon still has six sides even if we flip it upside down, for example. She also made her first steps into the field of abstract algebra, and soon caught the attention of famous mathematicians David Hilbert and Felix Klein.

Despite her clear talent for mathematics, other faculty members refused to accept the prospect of a women colleague.

In 1915, Hilbert, Klein, and the rest of the University of Göttingen's mathematics department were enamored with Einstein's radical new theory of general relativity. Hilbert and Klein hoped that Noether's expertise in invariants would help them work out unresolved issues with the new theory, and invited her to apply for a faculty position. Despite her clear talent for mathematics, other faculty members refused to accept the prospect of a women colleague.

"I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her," Hilbert implored university administrators, remarking that "we are a university, not a bathhouse." Unable to turn the tide, Hilbert instead offered Noether an unofficial and nonsalaried position where she lectured under his name.

Now at the center of the mathematical world, Noether threw herself at the problem of general relativity, which suggested that energy was not conserved and thus violated physical laws. Noether quickly resolved this problem with her own theorem, which argued that since time and energy were linked, Einstein's proposed relationship between space and time was possible without ignoring physical laws when physicists considered a large enough space.

Her conceptual way of thinking shifted the approach of mathematics from figures and formulas towards big ideas.

Noether's second theorem forged a link between symmetries in nature and conservation of energy, momentum, and electric charge. Her conceptual way of thinking shifted the approach of mathematics from figures and formulas towards big ideas. Generations of physicists have relied on her theorem to understand everything from subatomic particles to black holes. A prolific and versatile mathematician, she continued to make important theoretical contributions to a broad swatch of mathematical and physical topics throughout her career.

As a teacher, Noether's lectures, delivered without formal lesson plans and at rapid speed, were difficult for many of her student to follow. Those able to catch onto her breathless style soon became infected with her enthusiasm. Her passionate and lively delivery often caused her hair to come loose, much to the horror of her more prim and proper students.

She was devoted to the development of her students.

She was devoted to the development of her students. Noether frequently held lively dinner parties where they discussed their futures and mathematics, and hosted lectures at her home or at local coffee shops when the university was closed for holidays. Many of Noether's students, including mathematicians Max Duering, Hans Fitting, and Grete Hermann, an early critic of quantum mechanics, went on to have successful careers of their own, benefiting from her early insistence that they come up with their own ideas and learn to teach themselves.

By 1932, Noether was a well-respected member of the European mathematics community. She was finally in a paying, academic position at the University of Erlangen and shared the prestigious Kermann-Teubner Memorial Award for contributions to mathematics. In November that same year, she delivered a well-received plenary address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich.

Within six months, Adolf Hitler's administration dismissed Noether and many of her Jewish colleagues from their academic posts. As the Nazis consolidated power and the political climate in Germany decayed, Noether moved to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in late 1933, following the recommendation of Albert Einstein. Her short time in America is widely reported as pleasant and intellectually stimulating.

Noether died less than two years after moving to America as the result of surgical complications. Her colleagues and commentaries eulogized her as a creative mathematical genius that was undaunted by the challenges of her era.

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Meet mathematician Emmy Noether, mother of the most beautiful theorem in the world

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Massive's original deck of cards, featuring our Science Heroes Shop now Brilliant, creative, and assertive, Emmy Noether helped to fine-tune the theory of general relativity and kick-started a new field of mathematics with her conceptual, abstract approach and "big picture" ideas.

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I am a first-year medical student at Harvard Medical School. I graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in Biomedical Engineering and subsequently completed a Fulbright Scholarship in India. Alongside clinical medicine, I am passionate about improving the quality and delivery of healthcare, and hopes to leverage emerging technologies and policy levers to transform care for underserved populations. My current research focuses on using data analytics and informatics to measure the cost, quality, and appropriateness of care and inform the development of high-performing health systems and equitable policies. I also serve as the Managing Assistant Editor for Healthcare: The Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation, a peer-reviewed journal on healthcare delivery science published by Elsevier.

I have broad experience in health services and policy research at the organizational, state, and federal levels. I have worked on the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, digital health strategy and policy at the National Health Service England, and community hospital reinvestment programs at the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission. My work in healthcare information technology includes research at Boston Children's Hospital on using social media data to understand population-level health trends, and research at the MITRE Corporation on developing a rapid screening method for the diagnosis of mild traumatic brain injury among athletes and military personnel.

As a champion for education equity, I am the founder and CEO of ProjectCSGIRLS, an international nonprofit dedicated to encouraging middle school girls to pursue technology and computer science. I also co-founded the Action and Civic Tech Scholars Program to teach civic technology to underrepresented high school students in Dorchester, MA. Lastly, I serve on the board of She Rocks the World.

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I am a first-year medical student at Harvard Medical School. I graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in Biomedical Engineering and subsequently completed a Fulbright Scholarship in India. Alongside clinical medicine, I am passionate about improving the quality and delivery of healthcare, and hopes to leverage emerging technologies and policy levers to transform care for underserved populations.

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You probably know the name Katherine G. Johnson from the popular book-turned-movie " Hidden Figures." In the film, Johnson (played by actress Taraji P. Henson) is the protagonist who double-checks the numbers produced by the newly installed IBM computer before the astronaut, John Glenn, launches into space. She was pretty badass in the movie. In real-life, she was even more incredible.

Johnson was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, WV. She will turn 100 on August 26. Johnson has left her mark as a brilliant woman working as a human computer during the space race in the 1950s and '60s. On top of that, her charismatic personality and life story make her all the more endearing: an African-American girl from rural West Virginia, she counted her way to reach the stars.

She loved what she did

Katherine Johnson loved numbers from an early age. Her love of counting - steps, number of dishes she washed, and even the stars - primed her for starting high school as a 10 year old. She excelled in school, devouring knowledge and starting college at just 15. Her professor at West Virginia State College, William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, the third African-American to receive a PhD in mathematics, recognized her gift with numbers. He encouraged Johnson to become a mathematician, mentoring her and even creating a special advanced class for her about the geometry of outer space.

Soon after graduating from college with highest honors in 1937, she started teaching. She was later one of three students, and the only woman, chosen specifically to desegregate the graduate school at West Virginia University. She never completed her graduate degree because of her desire to start a family (she raised three daughters) and her husband falling ill (he died from cancer in 1956). But she never forgot her dream of becoming a research mathematician.

She was a trailblazer

In 1952, after years working as a teacher and a stay-at-home mother, Johnson heard from a relative that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, a precursor to NASA) was hiring African-American "computers." She applied for a position, and was accepted, moving her whole family to VA to pursue her dream. In 1953, she started work at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA as a "computer who wore skirts." These human computers ran all the calculations for the engineers, helping to accelerate the space program.

Johnson fell in love with her job as soon as she started. She often worked 14-16 hour days, eyes bleary from staring at small numbers. But she remembers always being eager to go to work in the morning. Her ability to solve the complicated mathematical equations and geometry led to her invitation to join a team, the Space Task Force, that helped send the first man to the moon.

At Langley, Johnson became known as someone who asked questions to understand and asserted herself as a leader. She requested permission to sit in on the NACA briefings, where much of the important information related to the orbital trajectories was discussed, and was denied. She wasn't deterred. Instead, she asked if there was a law stating that she wasn't allowed in the briefing room (as Virginia was still deeply segregated at the time, it was a legitimate question). When told by the male engineers that women just weren't usually in the briefings, she explained persistently how important it was for her to understand the trajectories so that she could do the appropriate calculations, and she became the only woman in the briefings room.

In 1960, she co-authored a report with a NASA engineer, the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author for a research report. She calculated the trajectory for America's first manned trip to space with Alan Shepherd in 1961 and did all the calculations for the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.

But she is most famous for her work on the 1962 orbital mission by John Glenn. Langley had recently acquired their first IBM computer and it was programmed to calculate the trajectory of Glenn's orbit from take-off to splashdown. But the new computer was still prone to some hiccups, making the astronauts hesitant to trust the computer's calculated trajectory. Glenn specifically requested that Johnson perform the same calculations as the computer, but by hand. She remembers him saying, "Get the girl to check the numbers...if she says the numbers are good, I'm ready to go." It took her a day and a half to perform the calculations, but the numbers matched. Glenn's flight was a success, marking a turning point in the space race between the US and the Soviet Union. Her calculations - by hand - of complex mathematical equations helped get space heroes like Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong into space - and more important to her - successfully home.

She has inspired generations of women

Not only was she one of a small number of women employed by NASA during this era of space travel, she was also one of the even smaller subset of African-American women employed at the time. She did the same work as her white computer colleagues, yet African-American computers were paid less and worked in a separate, all-black West Area Computing section at the Langley Research Center.

Johnson retired in 1986, earning three Special Achievement Awards during her 33 years with NASA. She has received three honorary doctorates recognizing her as a pioneer in the American space movement. In 2015, at age 97, President Obama honored Katherine Johnson for her extraordinary work helping launch the US into space by awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor. NASA's Langley Research Center honored her in September 2017 by dedicating a new building in Hampton, VA, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility. Achieving popular culture fame, on International Women's Day this year, Mattel released a Katherine Johnson Barbie, part of the Inspiring Women line of dolls.

A remarkable woman, she is modest, adhering to her father's philosophy that "You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you," saying in an interview in September 2017, that she "didn't do anything alone." Her path to becoming such a successful mathematician at NASA was influenced greatly by Dorothy Vaughan, head of West Computing where Johnson first started, and all the strong, persevering women who helped pave the way during the early years of aeronautics.

Finally getting the acknowledgement she deserves for her incredible dedication and mathematical genius that she brought to the American space-race, Johnson still explains that she was just doing her job. She continues to encourage careers in science, engineering, and technology with wisdom we can all hope to fulfill: "like what you do and you will do your best."

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Meet Katherine Johnson, the computer who helped send men to the moon

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You probably know the name Katherine G. Johnson from the popular book-turned-movie " Hidden Figures." In the film, Johnson (played by actress Taraji P. Henson) is the protagonist who double-checks the numbers produced by the newly installed IBM computer before the astronaut, John Glenn, launches into space.

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Karen Uhlenbeck, whose seminal work helped launch an entire field of mathematics, was awarded the Abel Prize today in an announcement made from Oslo. The prize, created by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2003, is widely viewed as the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize.

Uhlenbeck's work has "led to some of the most dramatic advances in mathematics in the last 40 years," the prize citation reads.

Her research "inspired a generation of mathematicians," said François Labourie of the University of Côte d'Azur in France. "She wanders around and finds new things that nobody has found before."

In a phone interview today, Uhlenbeck said that she's "a bit overwhelmed," adding that after she learned about the prize on Sunday, she thought, "I hope I can hold myself together for this."

Uhlenbeck, who was born in 1942 in Cleveland, was a voracious reader as a child, but she didn't become deeply interested in mathematics until she enrolled in the freshman honors math course at the University of Michigan. "The structure, elegance and beauty of mathematics struck me immediately, and I lost my heart to it," she wrote in the book Mathematicians: An Outer View of the Inner World.

Mathematics research had another feature that appealed to her at the time: It is something you can work on in solitude, if you wish. In her early life, she said in 1997, "I regarded anything to do with people as being sort of a horrible profession."

In the mid-1960s Uhlenbeck attended graduate school at Brandeis University, where she chose Richard Palais for her adviser. Palais was exploring what was then mostly uncharted territory lying between analysis (a generalization of calculus) and topology and geometry (which study the structure of shapes). "I was attracted to that - the area in between things," Uhlenbeck said in an interview last year in Celebratio Mathematica. "It was like jumping off a deck where you didn't know what was going to happen."

Palais and the mathematician Stephen Smale (who won a Fields Medal for his topology research soon after) had just made an advance regarding "harmonic maps" that would form the springboard for some of Uhlenbeck's own most important results. The study of harmonic maps can be traced back to a centuries-old field of mathematics called the calculus of variations, which looks for shapes that are in equilibrium with respect to some natural physical measurement, such as energy, length or area. For instance, one of the oldest and most famous problems in the calculus of variations is the "brachistochrone" problem, posed by Johann Bernoulli in 1696, which asks for the curve down which a ball will roll most quickly from one point to another.

To understand what it means for a map to be harmonic, imagine some compact shape made of rubber - a rubber band, say, or a rubbery sphere. Next, choose a particular way to situate this shape inside a given space (such as an infinite three-dimensional space or a three-dimensional doughnut shape). This positioning of the shape is called a harmonic map if, roughly speaking, it puts the shape in equilibrium, meaning that the rubber won't snap into some different configuration that has lower elastic potential energy (what mathematicians call Dirichlet energy).

When the space you're mapping the rubbery shape into is a complicated object with holes (such as a doughnut surface or its higher-dimensional counterparts), a variety of harmonic maps may emerge. For instance, if you wrap a rubber band around the central hole of a doughnut surface, the band cannot shrink all the way down to a point without leaving the surface of the doughnut - instead it will contract down to the shortest route around the hole.

When the rubbery shape or the target space is some complicated, possibly high-dimensional object, figuring out the range of possibilities for harmonic maps can be tricky, since we can't simply build a physical model and then see what the rubber does. Intuitively, we might try to build a harmonic map by starting with any map and then looking for ways to deform it, little by little, to bring it closer to equilibrium. But it's not always clear whether such a process will eventually converge and reach equilibrium.

This question makes sense for other energy-like measures besides the Dirichlet energy, and Palais and Smale came up with a condition on energy measures which, when satisfied, guarantees that at least some of these deformation processes will indeed converge. The Palais-Smale condition was perfect for the one-dimensional case of harmonic maps, where we're mapping an (infinitely narrow) rubber band into some compact space like a sphere or doughnut surface. But when the rubbery shape has dimension greater than one - if it's a surface, for instance, or some higher-dimensional object - the Dirichlet energy does not always satisfy Palais and Smale's condition, meaning that the process of gradually deforming a mapping to reduce its Dirichlet energy may sometimes fail to converge to a harmonic map.

In the mid-1970s, while a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Uhlenbeck set out to understand what this failure to converge can look like. Her five years at Urbana-Champaign were not especially happy ones - she and her then husband were both professors there, and she felt as if she was seen primarily as a "faculty wife" - but while there she met a postdoctoral fellow named Jonathan Sacks. Together, they explored a sequence of different energy-like measures on two-dimensional surfaces that each satisfies the Palais-Smale condition, and that approach the Dirichlet energy. In each of these alternative energy measures, the Palais-Smale condition guarantees that there is an energy-minimizing map. As the energy in question gets closer and closer to the Dirichlet energy, Uhlenbeck and Sacks asked, do these maps converge to a harmonic map?

The answer, they showed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is "almost." At nearly every point of the surface, these maps do converge to a harmonic map. But at a finite collection of points on the surface, the maps may start to form a very specific kind of singularity called a bubble where there's no way to make sense of a mapping.

To envision a bubble singularity, imagine that you're chewing gum, and you blow a bubble but then gradually pull more and more of the gum inside your mouth, while still maintaining the bubble at the same size. The gum forming the bubble will get stretched thinner and thinner, but the bubble will remain viable throughout this process (at least in an idealized setting in which the gum is infinitely stretchable). But at the end of this process, the bubble will pop, since you've pulled essentially all the gum inside your mouth.

In a similar way, Sacks and Uhlenbeck showed, the maps that minimize the alternative forms of energy converge to a harmonic map nearly everywhere, but near a handful of points on the surface they start to form bubbles. As the energy gets closer and closer to the Dirichlet energy, these bubbles will be built from smaller and smaller patches of the surface. At the end of the process, when we reach the actual Dirichlet energy, the map will want to make an entire bubble out of only a single point, so we'll hit a singularity. Since the compact space the surface is getting mapped into - something like a sphere or a doughnut surface - has only a finite number of holes around which bubbles can form, there are only finitely many of these bubbling singularities.

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Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize | Quanta Magazine

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Karen Uhlenbeck, whose seminal work helped launch an entire field of mathematics, was awarded the Abel Prize today in an announcement made from Oslo. The prize, created by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2003, is widely viewed as the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize.

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What it's like to live on the International Space Station | Cady Coleman

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1. For as far back as she can remember, she loved math

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Since an early age, Marjorie Lee Browne was a mathematician at heart. She loved it both for the intellectual engagement, as well as the freedom it granted. She once told an interviewer, "I was rather introverted, and as far back as I can remember I liked mathematics because it was a lonely subject. I could do it alone."

She was born and raised a predominantly black community in Memphis, Tennessee. Browne's father, Lawrence Johnson Lee, was renowned by friends and family for his mental arithmetic. He had attended college for two years (highly unusual for black men at the beginning of the 20th century) and had enough of a formal education to inspire an early interest in math in both Browne and her brother. Browne's mother died when she was two, and her father whole-heartedly adopted the role of caring for his children - and for the local community at large. He wasn't wealthy, but he did have a steady paycheck, so he'd invite the entire local high school football team over for spaghetti and meatballs before a big game.

Illustration by Matteo Farinella

2. She was one of the first African American women to earn a math PhD
Lee sent Browne to the best schools he could: prestigious, predominantly African American private institutions. After graduating with a math degree cum laude from Howard University in 1935, Browne moved to New Orleans to live with her uncle and teach math at a secondary school.

In the 1940s, it was extremely unusual for a black woman to earn a bachelor's degree in math. It was even more unusual for a black woman to take this a step further and pursue graduate work. But Browne loved math, and she wanted more.

So she moved north, where she worked as a teaching assistant while conducting research towards her PhD at University of Michigan. In 1949, she became the third black woman to earn a PhD in math. Her dissertation was titled, "On the One Parameter Subgroups in Certain Topological and Matrix Groups."
3. She was a proponent of math education for everyone, especially school teachers
The next African American woman to earn a math PhD didn't do so until 1960. Even today, black women are extremely underrepresented in math, and black men and women only make up about 1 percent of PhDs in math in America.

Browne recognized that increasing involvement of black women in STEM fields was a systemic problem, one that needed to be addressed with long term, sustainable solutions. She viewed early education as a primary route to inspire confidence in young mathematicians.

From 1949 to 1979, Browne taught at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a historically black university. While she served as department chair, NCCU was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation grant, the first granted to a predominantly black institution, to teach secondary school teachers about advanced mathematics.
4. Her love for math education triumphed over her own needs
Browne spent her summers with local teachers, filling them in on the wonders of linear algebra. She inspired many high school teachers to go on and receive advanced degrees, effectively improving the quality of math education in North Carolina. In the words of one of her former students, "Her thoroughness, demands for excellence and rigor, wisdom, vision, and productive powers in the classroom have profoundly influenced not only the academic growth and development of countless students but also their aspirations to achieve and succeed in the field of mathematics."

Like many professors, Browne constantly balanced her own research with teaching others. For Browne, education often came first. Although she was a mathematical prodigy, she spent most of her time preparing lectures rather than authoring publications, and writing grants to help fund outstanding students rather than her own research. She typically taught for 15 hours each week in addition to the time she spent preparing courses and mentoring students.

"If I had to live my life again, I wouldn't do anything else. I love mathematics."

Browne is also responsible for setting up the first computer center at a historically black university, enabled by her successful application for a $60,000 grant from IBM in 1960. Additionally, she was known for giving her own money to students for tuition, food, and conferences. After she died, NCCU established the Marjorie Lee Browne Trust to continue her efforts.
5. She advanced the pursuit of pure math
Browne's incredible selflessness fueled an entire generation of mathematicians.

There are few people who speak about mathematics as elegantly as Marjorie Lee Browne did. She believed that math should be done for pure intellectual pursuit, defining a mathematician as someone who "appreciates the beauty, power, and eloquence of mathematics as one of the greatest art forms."

Not surprisingly, then, Browne's work was largely on abstract math. She explored the fundamental properties of shapes, a field known as topology. Her biggest contribution, " A Note on the Classical Groups," is three pages of intense mathematical proof about the geometry of fundamental algebraic objects.

Browne worked at NCCU until she retired in 1979. She passed away just several months later, leaving an important legacy for black women in math, and the field of math at large. Looking back on her life, Browne noted, "If I had to live my life again, I wouldn't do anything else. I love mathematics."

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5 facts about Marjorie Lee Browne, African American math prodigy and pioneer

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1. For as far back as she can remember, she loved math Massive's original deck of cards, featuring our Science Heroes Shop now Since an early age, Marjorie Lee Browne was a mathematician at heart. She loved it both for the intellectual engagement, as well as the freedom it granted.

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In Afghanistan, a group of teenage girls are trying to build a mechanized, hand-operated ventilator for coronavirus patients, using a design from M.I.T. and parts from old Toyota Corollas.

It sounds like an impossible dream, but then again, the all-girls robotics team in question is called the "Afghan Dreamers." Living a country where two-thirds of adolescent girls cannot read or write, they're used to overcoming challenges.

The team of some dozen girls aged 15 to 17 was formed three years ago by Roya Mahboob, an Afghan tech entrepreneur who heads the Digital Citizen Fund, a group that runs classes for girls in STEM and robotics and oversees and funds the Afghan Dreamers. "I'm really proud of these young girls - [who are] feeling that they have to help their community," says Mahboob. "It's amazing and hopeful for the future of Afghanistan."

The virus most likely entered the country in early March as hundreds of thousands of Afghan workers fled the coronavirus outbreak in neighboring Iran. They came through the western province of Herat, where the Afghan Dreamers live.

In fighting the pandemic, Afghanistan is at a disadvantage."You are talking about a country that is now struck by COVID-19, which comes on top of ongoing war and abject poverty," says Toby Lanzer, the humanitarian coordinator for U.N. agencies working in Afghanistan.

The country only has capacity to test 1,000 people a day, so the number of confirmed cases, at over 7,000 is considered an undercount, says Lanzer. And there's only about 200 working ventilators for a country of 35 million people, he estimates.

To deal with the shortfall, on March 26, the then-governor [he has since stepped down] of Herat, Abdul Qayoum Rahimi, gathered two doctors, university graduates, local industrialists and the Afghan Dreamers.

The doctors presented them with a challenge: to help mechanize their hand-operated ventilators, also known as bag-valve-masks. This type of ventilator is a large inflatable bag attached to a mask that slips over the nose and mouth. A health worker manually squeezes the bag to get air into the lungs. They're quite cheap and common - they're used in ambulances and in emergency care to help patients breathe until they can be ventilated on a machine.

Officials feared there would not be enough health workers to hand-operate the equipment in the event of an outbreak. They hoped the Afghan Dreamers could build a prototype of a mechanized ventilator that could be replicated and mass produced, says Mahboob.

And amid a global demand, officials also worried that impoverished Afghanistan could not compete with wealthy countries to buy fully automated ventilators typically used in ICU rooms.

A ventilator typically costs around $50,000, says Douglas Chin, a Harvard-educated surgeon who has been helping the Afghan Dreamers with their prototype. By comparison, he says, producing a mechanized hand-operated ventilator could cost around $500.

After the meeting with the governor, a team of four Afghan Dreamers began looking online for open-source design ventilators. Mahboob and Somaya Farooqi, the 17-year-old team captain, came across a design released by MIT for a low-cost, low-tech ventilator called the MIT E-Vent.

"They found us," says Alexander Slocum, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, whose team released the design in March.

The design is deliberately low-tech so it can be replicated using locally sourced products around the world. For instance, it calls for installing a microprocessor, usually included in robotics kits for kids and teens. And it can be built out of widely available machine parts.

The MIT team on their website says their design "cannot replace an FDA-approved ICU ventilator in terms of functionality, flexibility and clinical efficacy" but that it could help in "life-or-death situations where there is no other option."

Slocum estimates about a dozen teams, from places as diverse as Chile to Iran are building ventilators using the design. The Afghan Dreamers, he says, is the only all-female team he is aware of, and they come from the poorest country.

They were also the first to figure out that windshield wiper motors could be finagled into powering a working ventilator.

"So I just hope no one gets mad at us, or them, in particular when the rainy season comes and they go to their car and there's no wipers," says Slocum, jokingly.

The Afghan Dreamers have had a number of challenges while building the prototype. For one, they're working while fasting - it's the Muslim month of Ramadan. They also have to keep safe amid the pandemic, says Farooqi. "Each of us work on a separate part of the ventilator. When we get together, we wear masks and gloves."

And because Herat is largely shut down due to COVID, Farooqi says the team had to be ingenious about sourcing parts. "Most of the material we are using is actually from Toyota Corolla car parts" from nearby secondhand markets, such as the windshield wipers, a gear box and motor, along with some motorbike parts.

Corollas are a common type of car in Afghanistan, so if this prototype works, the ventilator should be cheap and easy to replicate using parts likely to be available at car shops, says Mahboob.

The girls are now trying to get the machine to be able to sense a patient's breathing pattern and adjust the amount of air they get accordingly.

For the ventilator to do that, the team needs two parts - a "pressure transducer" - a sensor that converts pressure measurements from breath into electrical signals - and a microprocessor to process those signals into a pump of air.

Both parts cost about $50 each but the team can't source them locally or ship them into Afghanistan. There is no mail service that the women can access. And so six weeks into building their ventilator, the women are now trying to find a way get these last parts.

Some health officials in Afghanistan are doubtful that the girls will succeed. "We appreciate this idea," says Muhammad Rafiq Sherzai, spokesman for the Herat Public Health Department. But he notes the need to have the machines approved by appropriate organizations.

Indeed, once the team builds a successful prototype, it has to be tested and approved by the health ministry in Herat, and then in the capital Kabul. Once they have that approval, local factories can replicate the machine.

The team is optimistic. They've overcome other hurdles.

They first came to international attention three years ago, when they were refused visas twice to enter the U.S. for a robotics competition. Many visit visas are denied because some Afghans have used them to stay in the U.S. and never return to Afghanistan.

After an international outcry, President Donald Trump intervened and let them in.

They made it to the competition and even won an award for courage for their can-do attitude under difficult circumstances.

"That award was a result of our hard work. And it's made us work even harder," says Farooqi. Speaking of the ventilator her team is building, she adds, "even if it saves just one patient's life, I'll be happy.

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All-Girl Robotics Team In Afghanistan Works On Low-Cost Ventilator ... With Car Parts

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In Afghanistan, a group of teenage girls are trying to build a mechanized, hand-operated ventilator for coronavirus patients, using a design from M.I.T. and parts from old Toyota Corollas. It sounds like an impossible dream, but then again, the all-girls robotics team in question is called the "Afghan Dreamers."

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In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since.

One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider. Wu's name appears on more than 1,000 papers in high-energy physics, and she has contributed to a half-dozen of the most important experiments in her field over the past 50 years. She has even realized the improbable goal she set for herself as a young researcher: to make at least three major discoveries.

Wu was an integral member of one of the two groups that observed the J/psi particle, which heralded the existence of a fourth kind of quark, now called the charm. The discovery, in 1974, was known as the November Revolution, a coup that led to the establishment of the Standard Model of particle physics. Later in the 1970s, Wu did much of the math and analysis to discern the three "jets" of energy flying away from particle collisions that signaled the existence of gluons - particles that mediate the strong force holding protons and neutrons together. This was the first observation of particles that communicate a force since scientists recognized photons of light as the carriers of electromagnetism. Wu later became one of the group leaders for the ATLAS experiment, one of the two collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, filling in the final piece of the Standard Model. She continues to search for new particles that would transcend the Standard Model and push physics forward.

Sau Lan Wu was born in occupied Hong Kong during World War II. Her mother was the sixth concubine to a wealthy businessman who abandoned them and her younger brother when Wu was a child. She grew up in abject poverty, sleeping alone in a space behind a rice shop. Her mother was illiterate, but she urged her daughter to pursue an education and become independent of volatile men.

Wu graduated from a government school in Hong Kong and applied to 50 universities in the United States. She received a scholarship to attend Vassar College and arrived with $40 to her name.

Although she originally intended to become an artist, she was inspired to study physics after reading a biography of Marie Curie. She worked on experiments during consecutive summers at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, and she attended graduate school at Harvard University. She was the only woman in her cohort and was barred from entering the male dormitories to join the study groups that met there. She has labored since then to make a space for everyone in physics, mentoring more than 60 men and women through their doctorates.

Quanta Magazine joined Sau Lan Wu on a gray couch in sunny Cleveland in early June. She had just delivered an invited lecture about the discovery of gluons at a symposium to honor the 50th birthday of the Standard Model. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You work on the largest experiments in the world, mentor dozens of students, and travel back and forth between Madison and Geneva. What is a normal day like for you?

Very tiring! In principle, I am full-time at CERN, but I do go to Madison fairly often. So I do travel a lot.
How do you manage it all?
Well, I think the key is that I am totally devoted. My husband, Tai Tsun Wu, is also a professor, in theoretical physics at Harvard. Right now, he's working even harder than me, which is hard to imagine. He's doing a calculation about the Higgs boson decay that is very difficult. But I encourage him to work hard, because it's good for your mental state when you are older. That's why I work so hard, too.
Of all the discoveries you were involved in, do you have a favorite?
Discovering the gluon was a fantastic time. I was just a second- or third-year assistant professor. And I was so happy. That's because I was the baby, the youngest of all the key members of the collaboration.
The gluon was the first force-carrying particle discovered since the photon. The W and Z bosons, which carry the weak force, were discovered a few years later, and the researchers who found them won a Nobel Prize. Why was no prize awarded for the discovery of the gluon?
Well, you are going to have to ask the Nobel committee that. [Laughs.] I can tell you what I think, though. Only three people can win a Nobel Prize. And there were three other physicists on the experiment with me who were more senior than I was. They treated me very well. But I pushed the idea of searching for the gluon right away, and I did the calculations. I didn't even talk to theorists. Although I married a theorist, I never really paid attention to what the theorists told me to do.
How did you wind up being the one to do those calculations?
If you want to be successful, you have to be fast. But you also have to be first. So I did the calculations to make sure that as soon as a new collider at DESY [the German Electron Synchrotron] turned on in Hamburg, we could see the gluon and recognize its signal of three jets of particles. We were not so sure in those days that the signal for the gluon would be clear-cut, because the concept of jets had only been introduced a couple of years earlier, but this seemed to be the only way to discover gluons.
You were also involved in discovering the Higgs boson, the particle in the Standard Model that gives many other particles their masses. How was that experiment different from the others that you were part of?
I worked a lot more and a lot longer to discover the Higgs than I have on anything else. I worked for over 30 years, doing one experiment after another. I think I contributed a lot to that discovery. But the ATLAS collaboration at CERN is so large that you can't even talk about your individual contribution. There are 3,000 people who built and worked on our experiment. How can anyone claim anything? In the old days, life was easier.

Has it gotten any easier to be a woman in physics than when you started?

Not for me. But for younger women, yes. There is a trend among funding agencies and institutions to encourage younger women, which I think is great. But for someone like me it is harder. I went through a very difficult time. And now that I am established others say: Why should we treat you any differently?
Who were some of your mentors when you were a young researcher?
Bjørn Wiik really helped me when I was looking for the gluon at DESY.
How so?
Well, when I started at the University of Wisconsin, I was looking for a new project. I was interested in doing electron-positron collisions, which could give the clearest indication of a gluon. So I went to talk to another professor at Wisconsin who did these kinds of experiments at SLAC, the lab at Stanford. But he was not interested in working with me.

So I tried to join a project at the new electron-positron collider at DESY. I wanted to join the JADE experiment [abbreviated from the nations that developed the detector: Japan, Germany (Deutschland) and England]. I had some friends working there, so I went to Germany and I was all set to join them. But then I heard that no one had told a big professor in the group about me, so I called him up. He said, "I am not sure if I can take you, and I am going on vacation for a month. I'll phone you when I get back." I was really sad because I was already in Germany at DESY.

But then I ran into Bjørn Wiik, who led a different experiment called TASSO, and he said, "What are you doing here?" I said, "I tried to join JADE, but they turned me down." He said, "Come and talk to me." He accepted me the very next day. And the thing is, JADE later broke their chamber, and they could not have observed the three-jet signal for gluons when we observed it first at TASSO. So I have learned that if something does not work out for you in life, something else will.

You certainly turned that negative into a positive.

Yes. The same thing happened when I left Hong Kong to attend college in the U.S. I applied to 50 universities after I went through a catalog at the American consulate. I wrote in every application, "I need a full scholarship and room and board," because I had no money. Four universities replied. Three of them turned me down. Vassar was the only American college that accepted me. And it turns out, it was the best college of all the ones I applied to.

If you persist, something good is bound to happen. My philosophy is that you have to work hard and have good judgment. But you also have to have luck.
I know this is an unfair question, because no one ever asks men, even though we should, but how can society inspire more women to study physics or consider it as a career?
Well, I can only say something about my field, experimental high-energy physics. I think my field is very hard for women. I think partially it's the problem of family.

My husband and I did not live together for 10 years, except during the summers. And I gave up having children. When I was considering having children, it was around the time when I was up for tenure and a grant. I feared I would lose both if I got pregnant. I was less worried about actually having children than I was about walking into my department or a meeting while pregnant. So it's very, very hard for families.
I think it still can be.
Yeah, but for the younger generation it's different. Nowadays, a department looks good if it supports women. I don't mean that departments are deliberately doing that only to look better, but they no longer actively fight against women. It's still hard, though. Especially in experimental high-energy physics. I think there is so much traveling that it makes having a family or a life difficult. Theory is much easier.

You have done so much to help establish the Standard Model of particle physics. What do you like about it? What do you not like?

It's just amazing that the Standard Model works as well as it does. I like that every time we try to search for something that is not accounted for in the Standard Model, we do not find it, because the Standard Model says we shouldn't.

But back in my day, there was so much that we had yet to discover and establish. The problem now is that everything fits together so beautifully and the Model is so well confirmed. That's why I miss the time of the J/psi discovery. Nobody expected that, and nobody really had a clue what it was.

But maybe those days of surprise aren't over.
We know that the Standard Model is an incomplete description of nature. It doesn't account for gravity, the masses of neutrinos, or dark matter - the invisible substance that seems to make up six-sevenths of the universe's mass. Do you have a favorite idea for what lies beyond the Standard Model?
Well, right now I am searching for the particles that make up dark matter. The only thing is, I am committed to working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. But a collider may or may not be the best place to look for dark matter. It's out there in the galaxies, but we don't see it here on Earth.

Still, I am going to try. If dark matter has any interactions with the known particles, it can be produced via collisions at the LHC. But weakly interacting dark matter would not leave a visible signature in our detector at ATLAS, so we have to intuit its existence from what we actually see. Right now, I am concentrating on finding hints of dark matter in the form of missing energy and momentum in a collision that produces a single Higgs boson.
What else have you been working on?
Our most important task is to understand the properties of the Higgs boson, which is a completely new kind of particle. The Higgs is more symmetric than any other particle we know about; it's the first particle that we have discovered without any spin. My group and I were major contributors to the very recent measurement of Higgs bosons interacting with top quarks. That observation was extremely challenging. We examined five years of collision data, and my team worked intensively on advanced machine-learning techniques and statistics.

In addition to studying the Higgs and searching for dark matter, my group and I also contributed to the silicon pixel detector, to the trigger system [that identifies potentially interesting collisions], and to the computing system in the ATLAS detector. We are now improving these during the shutdown and upgrade of the LHC. We are also very excited about the near future, because we plan to start using quantum computing to do our data analysis.

Do you have any advice for young physicists just starting their careers?

Some of the young experimentalists today are a bit too conservative. In other words, they are afraid to do something that is not in the mainstream. They fear doing something risky and not getting a result. I don't blame them. It's the way the culture is. My advice to them is to figure out what the most important experiments are and then be persistent. Good experiments always take time.
But not everyone gets to take that time.
Right. Young students don't always have the freedom to be very innovative, unless they can do it in a very short amount of time and be successful. They don't always get to be patient and just explore. They need to be recognized by their collaborators. They need people to write them letters of recommendation.

The only thing that you can do is work hard. But I also tell my students, "Communicate. Don't close yourselves off. Try to come up with good ideas on your own but also in groups. Try to innovate. Nothing will be easy. But it is all worth it to discover something new."
Correction July 18, 2018: Due to miscommunication, this article was slightly revised to more accurately reflect Wu's view of the current state of particle physics. This article was reprinted on Wired.com and Wired.jp.

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Why Nature Prefers Couples, Even for Yeast

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Sau Lan Wu's Three Major Physics Discoveries and Counting | Quanta Magazine

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In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since. One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu.

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Mary JACKSON

20th century

Born: 1921 in Hampton, Virginia (USA)
Death: 2005 in Hampton, Virginia (USA)

Main achievements: NASA's first black female engineer.
Mary Winston Jackson was an African American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division. She took advanced engineering classes and in 1958 became NASA's first black female engineer.

After 34 years at NASA, Jackson had earned the most senior engineering title available. She realized she could not earn further promotions without becoming a supervisor. She accepted a demotion to become a manager of both the Federal Women's Program, in the NASA Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, and of the Affirmative Action Program. In this role, she worked to influence both the hiring and promotion of women in NASA's science, engineering, and mathematics careers.

Jackson's story features in the non-fiction book Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016). She is one of the three protagonists in Hidden Figures, the film adaptation released the same year.

Mary Winston was born on April 9, 1921, to Ella and Frank Winston. She grew up in Hampton, Virginia, where she graduated from the all-black George P. Phenix Training School with highest honors.

Mary Jackson earned bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physical science from Hampton Institute in 1942. She was a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first sorority founded by and for African-American women.

Jackson served for more than thirty years as a Girl Scout leader. She was noted in the 1970s for helping black children in her community create a miniature wind tunnel for testing airplanes.

Jackson was married with two children. She died on February 11, 2005, at age 83.

After graduation, Jackson taught math at a black school in Calvert County, Maryland, for a year. Public schools were still segregated across the South. She also began tutoring high school and college students, which she continued to do throughout her life.

By 1943, she had returned to Hampton, where she became a bookkeeper at the National Catholic Community Center there. She worked as a receptionist and clerk at the Hampton Institute's Health Department; she returned home for the birth of her son. In 1951 she became a clerk at the Office of the Chief, Army Field Forces at Fort Monroe.

In 1951 Jackson was recruited by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She started as a research mathematician, or computer, at the Langley Research Center in her hometown of Hampton, Virginia. She worked under Dorothy Vaughan in the segregated West Area Computing Section.

In 1953 she accepted an offer to work for engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki in the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel. The 4 by 4 foot (1.2 by 1.2 m), 60,000 horsepower (45,000 kW) wind tunnel used to study forces on a model by generating winds at almost twice the speed of sound. Czarnecki encouraged Jackson to undergo training so that she could be promoted to an engineer. She needed to take graduate-level courses in math and physics to qualify for the job. They were offered in a night program by the University of Virginia, held at the all-white Hampton High School. Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton to allow her to attend the classes. After completing the courses, she was promoted to aerospace engineer in 1958, and became NASA's first black female engineer. She analyzed data from wind tunnel experiments and real-world aircraft flight experiments at the Theoretical Aerodynamics Branch of the Subsonic-Transonic Aerodynamics Division at Langley. Her goal was to understand air flow, including thrust and drag forces, in order to improve United States planes.

Jackson worked as an engineer in several NASA divisions: the Compressibility Research Division, Full-Scale Research Division, High-Speed Aerodynamics Division, and the Subsonic-Transonic Aerodynamics Division. She ultimately authored or co-authored 12 technical papers for NACA and NASA. She worked to help women and other minorities to advance their careers, including advising them how to study in order to qualify for promotions.

After 34 years at NASA, Jackson had achieved the most senior title within the engineering department. She decided to take a demotion in order to serve as an administrator in the Equal Opportunity Specialist field. After undergoing training at NASA Headquarters, she returned to Langley. She worked to make changes and highlight women and other minorities who were accomplished in the field. She served as both the Federal Women's Program Manager in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs and as the Affirmative Action Program Manager, and she worked to influence the career paths of women in science, engineering, and mathematics positions at NASA. She continued to work at NASA until her retirement in 1985.

The 2016 film Hidden Figures recounts the NASA careers of Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan, specifically their work on Project Mercury during the Space Race. The film is based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly. Jackson is portrayed in the film by Janelle Monae.

Source: Wikipedia

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20th century Born: 1921 in Hampton, Virginia (USA) Death: 2005 in Hampton, Virginia (USA) Main achievements: NASA's first black female engineer. Mary Winston Jackson was an African American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

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1. At age 20, Bartik became one of the first "computers"

In 1945, farm-grown Jean Jennings Bartik (born Betty Jean Jennings) finished her degree in mathematics at Northwest Missouri State University and was ready for her next adventure. She saw an ambiguous advertisement in the paper for "college women with a degree in mathematics," applied, and was offered the job. The next night she hopped on a steam-powered train from her small rural town to the bustling city of Philadelphia. Her expertise was needed for a specific reason: to compute the trajectories of ballistic missiles.

Illustration by Matteo Farinella

The missile trajectories depended on specific weather and atmospheric conditions, which were entered into a complex equation in order to generate an entire table of values. The Army needed mathematically-savvy people for these calculations, but all the men were fighting the war. So, they offered a $2,000 salary to over 100 women to work at the University of Pennsylvania as "computers." For most of World War II, all of the computers and their supervisors were women. Each ballistic table took 40 hours to compute, and as the war continued, the demand for calculations was overwhelming.

2. She programmed the first electronic computer

The Army decided to launch a secret project to automate these calculations, which soon became known as the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator ( ENIAC). With the pioneering work of Bartik and five other women, known as the "Sensational Six," ENIAC became the first computer that could be programmed for multiple purposes - the predecessor to our modern day computers. Bartik was the youngest woman in the group.

The process of programming ENIAC was painstaking. Despite being integral to ENIAC's development, at first the women weren't given clearance to enter the huge room that contained the 80-foot long mass of steel, cables, switches, and 16,000 vacuum tubes. The women were given circuit diagrams of the ENIAC and challenged with the task of figuring out how it all worked - and how to program it.

"The ENIAC was a son of a bitch to program."

Bartik was responsible for the math. Once the women had worked it all out on paper, they were granted clearance to actually interact with the machine. The hard work wasn't over though - programming ENIAC meant physically moving all of the cables and thousands of switches as they'd designed. In Bartik's own words, "The ENIAC was a son of a bitch to program."

With their designs, the computer was ultimately able to compute ballistic tables in seconds. The Army announced its accomplishment and set a public demonstration date. On Valentine's Day, 1946, Bartik and her colleague Betty Snyder were up late fixing the 30-ton machine. "Most people consider Valentine's Day a romantic day," Bartik writes, "but we never gave a thought that evening of valentines or romantic dinners. What we were thinking of was an all-important demonstration we were to run next day for the world."

United States Army

The demonstration was an enormous success, but none of the women were even introduced during it. Afterwards, there was a celebratory dinner with invited scholars from near and far. The women were sent home.

3. Her contributions to computing didn't end there

Before our computers were packed with apps, or even basic strings of commands, they couldn't remember anything. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, the masterminds behind the ENIAC, went on to engineer machines that could flexibly store information (EDVAC) as well as the first commercial computer (UNIVAC). They hired Bartik and Synder as the sole UNIVAC programmers, challenged with crafting the UNIVAC's ability to read and record data from reels of magnetic tape. Bartik worked on multiple iterations of the UNIVAC, and she warmly reflects on this part of her career. In 1951, a UNIVAC computer correctly predicted that Dwight Eisenhower would win the 1952 election, despite all signs pointing towards Adlai Stevenson.

Promotional photo distributed in 1969, used under fair use

In total, Bartik spent four decades of her life programming, designing, and promoting the possibility of computers.

4. She had a longstanding interest in writing

Bartik originally went to college for journalism, but she soon realized she couldn't afford to attend journalism school after college. Luckily for the future of computing, she also had a longstanding interest in math: "I had always considered mathematics as fun, like solving puzzles, thus more of a game than a subject for serious study." Ultimately, she received a degree in mathematics with a minor in English.

In 1951, Bartik stopped working on computing machines in order to raise her children. During this time, she also completed a master's degree in English at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1967, she began to work for Auerbach Corporation as a writer and editor of technical reports on computers, combining her two great academic interests. She went on to various other jobs as a product manager and editor, and spent the last years of her working life as a real estate agent. ( She died in 2011 at the age of 86.)

5. She was a persistent champion of women in computer science

All of the ENIAC programmers were women. Yet, the history of computing - even decades later - did not usually mention them. After looking at the program for a history of computing panel in 1975, Bartik wrote the chair of the seminar about how ridiculous it was to not include women. As a result, he asked her to speak. The experience inspired her to write an autobiography about all of the instances she and her female colleagues were left behind in history.

Each step of the way in her telling was a fight. When all of the men returned from the war, many companies, such as IBM, fired all of their women to rehire the men. Bartik fought to maintain her position, and was one of few women able to do so. Although she received outstanding performance reviews at Auerbach each year, Bartik was never promoted. She went to the local Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was investigating multiple cases of discrimination against women in Philadelphia. They were deeply interested in her case, and encouraged her to collect as much information on her productivity as possible. However, filing a lawsuit required time and money that she didn't have as a single mother with three children . Bartik's fight happened on a smaller scale - insisting that she be allowed to smoke, or going to higher managers when her direct supervisors wouldn't listen to her ideas. Even when her ideas were implemented, she was reprimanded for such challenges to their authority.

The ENIAC women were almost completely forgotten until 1986, when a Harvard undergraduate, Kathy Kleinman, wrote her thesis (and ultimately made a documentary) on early women in computing. Fortunately, Kleinman grabbed the attention of Wall Street Journal writer Tom Petzinger, who wrote articles about the full story of ENIAC's development. Bartik didn't receive any formal credit for her work on the first computer until 1997, when she was in her 70s.

As for young women in computer science now, Bartik says, "you should be prepared, and work hard -everybody that succeeds must work hard - and open the door when opportunity knocks. Opportunity comes in a lot of different ways. But I do believe that you should enjoy what you do."

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5 facts about Jean Bartik, expert programmer of the world's first computer

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In 1945, farm-grown Jean Jennings Bartik (born Betty Jean Jennings) finished her degree in mathematics at Northwest Missouri State University and was ready for her next adventure. She saw an ambiguous advertisement in the paper for "college women with a degree in mathematics," applied, and was offered the job.

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The event: Talks and performances from TED Fellows, celebrating the 10th anniversary of this life-changing, world-changing program. Session 1 is hosted by TED Fellows director Shoham Arad and TED Senior Fellow Jedidah Isler. When and where: Monday, April 15, 2019, 10:30am, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC. Opening: We begin the day by [...]

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Should we be putting humans on Mars? A panel of space experts brings up the big questions we need to ask before we blast off.

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Tides are strong. They move swiftly, sweeping all toward the shore. But TED Fellows refuse to simply drift with the water. They are innovators, advocates and artists who challenge the status quo and work in the spaces between disciplines. At the second TED Fellows Retreat - held from August 25-28, 2015, and themed "Swimming Against the Tide" - about [...]

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The event: Talks and performances from TED Fellows, celebrating the 10th anniversary of this life-changing, world-changing program. Session 1 is hosted by TED Fellows director Shoham Arad and TED Senior Fellow Jedidah Isler. When and where: Monday, April 15, 2019, 10:30am, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC.

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There was a time, during her early years in Tehran, when Maryam Mirzakhani preferred literature to arithmetic. But by her adolescence, any uncertainty about her academic calling had been cast aside; she was clearly a mathematician.

As a teenager she won two gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiads for high school students, the second of which was accompanied by a perfect score. Mirzakhani went on to earn a degree in mathematics from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran before moving to the U.S. to pursue her PhD at Harvard under the guidance of Curtis McMullen, a Fields Medal recipient. She would soon follow in his footsteps.

Illustration by Matteo Farinella

Mirzakhani, who died of breast cancer at age 40, was the only woman - and the only Iranian - ever to win a Fields Medal. It's the most prestigious award in mathematics, akin to a Nobel Prize, and she was honored in 2014 for her work on the geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.

Mirzakhani's research focused on the dynamics of geometric surfaces. Confusing, theoretical abstractions to most, she had a way with shapes and space, and could understand their complexities to a degree unmatched by most scholars in her field. She even had a knack for making it fun. Perhaps her most relatable work (though still wildly complex) is the " Magic Wand Theorem," which explains the movement of a billiard ball as it bounces endlessly around a pool table.

Her understanding was so exceptional that her dissertation laid out solutions to two mathematical problems, each of which was noteworthy enough to earn her widespread recognition in the field. She won the Fields Medal at age 37.

However inconceivable her accomplishments may seem, Mirzakhani's description of the pleasure she took in her arduous work would be familiar to any researcher:

Of course, the most rewarding part is the "Aha" moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new - the feeling of being on top of a hill and having a clear view. But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight.

Mirzakhani will be remembered for the special relationship she had with invisible boundaries-the ones that encapsulated the geometric shapes she understood like few before her, and the ones she broke when she became the first woman, and first Iranian, to win the Fields Medal. In just four decades, she blazed a trail that will both light the way for future scholars and be a daunting act to follow.

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Maryam Mirzakhani's mathematical legacy lives on

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The first woman to win a Fields Medal was only 40 when she died, but she revolutionized mathematics

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Stifled by sexism in Europe, she made foundational discoveries in astronomy after coming to the US

"I spring quite literally from a pagan background."

There is only one person capable of introducing themselves that way in their own autobiography: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of the most original scientists to ever live. She was the first to determine that the stars were made of hydrogen and helium. In doing so, as a young graduate student, she bucked contemporary scientific theory. Prevented by sexism from being awarded her degree, and then a professorship, she eventually became the first woman to chair a department at Harvard University.

Cecilia Payne knew she wanted to be a scientist early on. As an eight year old, she recognized a bee orchid from her mother's stories about the Italian Riviera. She later recalled that moment saying, "For the first time I knew the leaping of the heart, the sudden enlightenment, that were to become my passion." The rush of excitement that comes when the final puzzle piece fits into place, of seeing theory confirmed by practice, is something many scientists can identify.

"I think my life as a scientist began at that moment"

Matteo Farinella

She attended a private school, run by Miss Elizabeth Edwards, and credited her time there with providing her a rich education. But even with the best teachers, school in early 1900s England wasn't exactly a nursery for open-mindedness or the pursuit of knowledge. Left-handed students like Cecilia were forced to use their right hand, a process she found difficult and uncomfortable. As was the case with many schools at the time, religious trappings also meant that long hours were dedicated to hymn and prayer.

When it came time for college, Payne settled on astronomy after bouncing between botany and physics, and credited another teacher, the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, for putting her on the path of stars. In her first year at Cambridge, she attended a transformative lecture by Eddington about his expedition to test Einstein's general theory of relativity by observing the stars near a solar eclipse.

She remembered the power of that lecture: "My world has been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown." Payne published her first academic paper with Eddington as an undergraduate student, and even late in life considered him "the greatest man I have been privileged to know."

...her work was "undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy"

Studying physics at Cambridge in 1920s was a lonely prospect for a woman. Payne sat alone, since she was not allowed to occupy the same rows of seats as her male classmates. Though Payne fulfilled all the requirements for a degree in 1923, women were only granted "certificates" at Cambridge until 1948.

Such restrictive, sexist polices stifled any hope of a research career in the UK, so Payne moved to the United States. At the time, there was no regular graduate astronomy program at Harvard Observatory. For Payne, the intellectual stimulation and comparative freedom at Harvard was intoxicating. She threw herself into her work, spending long days and nights at the Observatory.

The work paid off, and in 1925 Payne became the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University, advised by with Harlow Shapley, the head of the Observatory. In her thesis, she inferred the cosmic abundance of the elements from stellar spectra, the range of radiation emitted by stars.

Her results showed that helium and especially hydrogen were by far the most common elements in stars, and hence in the universe. It was a view that contradicted the scientific consensus of the time, which was that the Sun, a star, and the Earth, a rocky planet, would provide similar spectra if measured at the same temperature.

Via Wikimedia

Astronomer Otto Struve, director of Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, gushed that her work was "undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy." A number of prominent astronomers of the day, including Henry Norris Russell, director of the Princeton University Observatory, dismissed her work as impossible. But even her staunchest critics relented after independent observations later proved that she was correct. Payne's findings are now central to any introductory astronomy course, where students learn that the Milky Way Galaxy is composed of ~73% hydrogen, 25% helium, and 2% other elements.

After her PhD, Payne took on a slew of less prestigious, low-paid research jobs, as women were not permitted to enter the Harvard academy at the time. She met her husband, Sergei Gaposchkin, during a visit to the Astronomische Gesellschaft meeting in Gottingen in 1933. The marriage spanned four decades, producing three children and stacks of manuscripts and books about the cosmos. Eventually, in 1956, Payne-Gaposchkin became both the first female professor in her faculty, and the first woman to become department chair at Harvard.

"Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money"

In 1976, the American Astronomical Society awarded her their highest honor, the Henry Norris Russell Prize (named after the same Henry Norris that once criticized her PhD work), in recognition of a lifetime of excellence in astronomical research. In her acceptance speech, Payne-Gaposchkin reflected on the thrill of discovery that she'd chased ever since she'd recognized that orchid as a little girl, saying "The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience."

Payne-Gaposchkin died in Cambridge in 1979. Near the end of her life, she wrote "Young people, especially young women, often ask me for advice. Here it is, valeat quantum. Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money. There are easier and better ways to reach them. Undertake it only if nothing else will satisfy you; for nothing else is probably what you will receive. Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other."

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Meet Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who figured out what the universe is made of

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Stifled by sexism in Europe, she made foundational discoveries in astronomy after coming to the US "I spring quite literally from a pagan background." There is only one person capable of introducing themselves that way in their own autobiography: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of the most original scientists to ever live.

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Antonia Maury was born March 21, 1866 into a true science family. Both her grandfather and her uncle were renowned scientists. She was helping her uncle, Henry Draper, in his laboratory as young as four years old. She was tasked with handing him the test tubes he needed for his chemistry experiment. By the time she went to Vassar College, she was primed to succeed in science.

Antonia Maury was one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, alongside other influential astronomers, such as Henrietta Leavitt, Cecilia Payne and Annie Jump Cannon. These women were hired by the astronomer Edward Charles Pickering to classify the observations made by the male astronomers at Harvard College. This was the late 1800s and early 1900s, and in a reflection of how science-minded women were treated at the time, were also called "Pickering's Harem."

Matteo Farinella

These brilliant women were hired as inexpensive labor, working for as little as 25 cents an hour. But Antonia Maury's accomplishments reflect the depth of talent these women had: She was a creative and independent scientist who made major contributions to astronomy, despite the challenges of working as - and sometimes, being treated as - a human computer.

Maury's job was to work on a catalog of stars honoring her late uncle, the Henry Draper Memorial. Her uncle was a pioneer in astrophotography, and was the first person to photograph a nebula. He also took many photos of the moon, including the first photo taken through a telescope. Draper died in 1882 and his wife, Mary Anna Draper, donated money to the Harvard Observatory to create the catalog of stars in his honor.

Maury did not like the classification system that Pickering and Fleming developed....She decided to make her own

This included bright stars in the northern hemisphere, which Maury studied. The men in the observatory would point their telescopes at these stars and obtain stellar spectra (a measure of the light a star emits). Depending on what a star is made of, it won't emit pure white light, which contains all the colors of the rainbow. Instead, only certain bands of color will show up on the spectrum. The colors that do and do not show up can tell astronomers something about the temperature and the size of the stars. For example, two lines in the yellow part of the spectrum, called D-lines, indicate a star contains sodium.

Maury did not like the classification system that Pickering and Fleming developed, which only included 12 types of stars. She decided to make her own. She reordered some of their classes, and added some of her own, resulting in a classification of 22 different types of stars, which were based on the combination of colored lines in the stellar spectra. The truly innovative part of her classification was the addition of lettered classes, a, b and c, indicating the brightness and width of the lines.

Harvard College Observatory on Wikimedia Commons

During her time at the Harvard College Observatory, Maury did not get along well with Pickering, the director of the observatory and her boss. He did not like that she created her own classification system, taking away time from her work on the Draper Memorial. Maury was described as an "independent renegade" by her colleague at the observatory Dorrit Hoffleit. Hoffleit surmised that she probably got away with this because of her family status, a perk the other women who worked with Pickering did not necessarily have.

Maury had an additional problem with Pickering: he would take credit for the women's work, including hers. She discovered that Zeta Ursae Majoris, one of the stars in the Big Dipper actually consisted of two stars, called a double star. She found this through spectroscopy, the first time this method had been used to discover a double star. However, Pickering didn't make her co-author on the paper describing this achievement, and only mentions her very briefly, saying: "a careful study of the results has been made by Miss. A. C. Maury, a niece of Dr. Draper."

With the "Spectra of Bright Stars," she was the first woman ever to publish a star catalog

Maury left the observatory in 1891 for a teaching position in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following her disagreements with Pickering. But it wasn't so easy to just leave. The Memorial Catalog for her uncle wasn't finished yet. His widow and her aunt, Mary Anna Draper, was paying for the project and wanted Antonia to keep working on it. The two did not get along. Mary wanted Antonia to finish the work, but was happy to cut ties with her afterwards.

Antonia did return to finish the work at Harvard twice, in 1893 and 1895. Eventually her contribution to the catalog ' Spectra of Bright Stars ' was published in 1897. On this work, Antonia was listed as an author and finally got her recognition. With it, she was also the first woman ever to publish a star catalog. By the time the catalog was published, she had already left the observatory and gone back to teaching. This would remain the case until 1918, when she returned to the Harvard Observatory as an adjunct professor.

Pickering died the next year, and Antonia got along much better with the new director. She published several works under her own name. During this time she studied Beta Lyrae, a star system in the Lyra constellation, and Upsilon Sagittarii, a star system in the Sagittarius constellation. Cecilia Payne, who worked with Maury, recalled: "She had a passion for understanding things. It was typical of her that she devoted years to the mysteries of Beta Lyrae and Upsilon Sagittarii, still incompletely solved."

Dodd, Mead and Company on Wikimedia Commons

Antonia Maury officially retired over 50 years after she started working at the Harvard Observatory, but continued her research -in addition to studying ornithology, natural history, and campaigning to save sequoia forests in the western US when they were threatened by timber companies - even after that. She passed away in 1952.

Antonia Maury published many influential papers during her time at the Observatory, such as her catalog on northern stars and her analysis of Beta Lyrae, and significantly impacted the field of astronomy with her work. Maury's enduring legacy is her classification system: Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung partially based his Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram, the main system to classify stars in modern times, on her c-characteristic. The official system of star classification adopted in 1922 by the International Astronomical Union used the letter c as well, to indicate narrow well-defined lines, a recognition of Antonia's classification work. This system, with minor changes, is still in use today.

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Meet Antonia Maury, astronomy's renegade who changed the way we classify stars

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Antonia Maury was born March 21, 1866 into a true science family. Both her grandfather and her uncle were renowned scientists. She was helping her uncle, Henry Draper, in his laboratory as young as four years old. She was tasked with handing him the test tubes he needed for his chemistry experiment.

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The Nobel Prize | Women who changed science | Tu Youyou

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Tu Youyou turned to Chinese medical texts from the Zhou, Qing, and Han Dynasties to find a traditional cure for malaria, ultimately extracting a compound - artemisinin - that has saved millions of lives. When she isolated the ingredient she believed would work, she volunteered to be the first human subject.

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On July 20, 1969, as the lunar module, Eagle, was approaching the moon's surface, its computers began flashing warning messages. For a moment Mission Control faced a "go / no-go" decision, but with high confidence in the software developed by computer scientist Margaret Hamilton and her team, they told the astronauts to proceed. The software, which allowed the computer to recognize error messages and ignore low-priority tasks, continued to guide astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin over the crater-pocked, dusty crust of the moon to their landing.

"It quickly became clear," she later said, "that [the] software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem, but that the software was compensating for it." An investigation would eventually show that the astronauts' checklist was at fault, telling them to set the rendezvous radar hardware switch incorrectly. "Fortunately, the people at Mission Control trusted our software," Hamilton said. And with only enough fuel for 30 more seconds of flight, Neil Armstrong reported, "The Eagle has landed."

The achievement was a monumental task at a time when computer technology was in its infancy: The astronauts had access to only 72 kilobytes of computer memory (a 64-gigabyte cell phone today carries almost a million times more storage space). Programmers had to use paper punch cards to feed information into room-sized computers with no screen interface.

As the landing occurred, Hamilton, then 32, was hooked up to Mission Control from MIT. "I was not concentrating on the mission, per se," Hamilton confessed. "I was concentrating on the software." After everything worked properly, the weight of the moment hit her. "My God. Look what happened. We did it. It worked. It was exciting."

Hamilton, who popularized the term "software engineering," took some chiding for it. Critics said it inflated her work's importance, but today, when software engineers represent a fervently sought-after segment of the work force, no one is laughing at Margaret Hamilton.

When the Apollo missions were planned, the process of writing code began on large sheets of paper. A keypunch operator would create holes in paper cards, keying the codes into what were called punch cards. "Not too many people know what punch cards are anymore, but that's how you programmed it," says Paul Ceruzzi, a curator emeritus at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, who has known Hamilton for the past two decades.

The museum holds in its collections the Apollo Flight Guidance Computer Software Collection created by Hamilton. The archival material includes printout sheets, known as "the listings," which show results of guidance equation calculations. When the computer's output identified no problems, software engineers would "eyeball" the listings, verifying that no issues required attention.

Once everything looked good, the code was sent to a Raytheon factory, where mostly women-many of them former employees of New England textile mills- wove copper wires and magnetic cores into a long "rope" of wire. With coding written in ones and zeroes, the wire went through the tiny magnetic core when it represented a one, and it went around the core when it represented a zero. This ingenious process created a rope that carried software instructions. The women who did the work were known as LOL, Hamilton told Ceruzzi, not because they were funny; it was short for "little old ladies." Hamilton was called "rope-mother."

The rope compensated for the Apollo computers' limited memory. The process created "a very robust system," according to Teasel Muir-Harmony, a curator also at the Air and Space Museum and author of the new book, Apollo to the Moon: A History in 50 Objects. " That was one of the reasons why the Apollo Guidance Computer worked flawlessly throughout every single mission."

A math lover from an early age, Hamilton transformed that affinity, becoming an expert in software writing and engineering following her departure from college. When her husband was attending law school at Harvard in 1959, she took a job at MIT, learning to write software that would predict the weather. A year later, she began programming systems to locate enemy aircraft in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program.

It was in the mid-1960s that Hamilton heard that MIT "had announced that they were looking for people to do programming to send man to the moon, and I just thought, 'Wow, I've got to go there.'" She had planned to begin graduate school at Brandeis University for a degree in abstract math, but the U.S. space program won her heart. Thanks to the success of her work at SAGE, she was the first programmer hired for the Apollo project at MIT. In 1965, she became head of her own team at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (later known as Draper Laboratory), which was dedicated to writing and testing software for Apollo 11's two 70-pound computers-one aboard the command module, Columbia, and one aboard the lunar module, Eagle.

"What I think about when I think about Margaret Hamilton is her quote that 'there was no choice but to be pioneers,' because I think that really embodies who she was and her significance in this program," Muir-Harmony says. "She was a pioneer when it came to development of software engineering and. . . . a pioneer as a woman in the workplace contributing to this type of program, taking on this type of role."

Then, as now, most software engineers were male, but she never let that stand in her way. "She has this mentality that there should be equal rights and equal access. And it wasn't about men and women. It was about people being able to pursue the kinds of jobs they want to pursue and take on the challenges they want to take on," Muir-Harmony says. "She was also really expansive as a programmer, coming up with solutions for problems, very innovative, very outside-the-box thinking. That, I think, is reflected in her career choices and the work she did in the lab."

In a bid to make software more reliable, Hamilton sought to design Apollo's software to be capable of dealing with unknown problems and flexible enough to interrupt one task to take on a more important one. In her search for new ways to debug a system, she realized that sound could serve as an error detector. Her program at SAGE, she noted, sounded like a seashore when it was running. Once, she was awakened by a colleague, who said that her program "no longer sounded like a seashore!" She rushed into work eager to find the problem and to start applying this new form of debugging to her work.

As a working mother, she took her young daughter to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory with her at night and on weekends. One day, her daughter decided to "play astronaut" and pushed a simulator button that made the system crash. Hamilton realized immediately that the mistake was one that an astronaut could make, so she recommended adjusting the software to address it, but she was told: "Astronauts are trained never to make a mistake."

During Apollo 8's moon-orbiting flight, astronaut Jim Lovell made the exact same error that her young daughter had, and fortunately, Hamilton's team was able to correct the problem within hours. But for all future Apollo flights, protection was built into the software to make sure it never happened again. Over time, Hamilton began to view the whole mission as a system: "part is realized as software, part is peopleware, part is hardware."

Hamilton's work guided the remaining Apollo missions that landed on the moon as well as benefitting Skylab, the first U.S. space station, in the 1970s. In 1972, she left MIT and started her own company, Higher Order Software. Fourteen years later, she launched another company, Hamilton Technologies, Inc. At her new firm, she created Universal Systems Language, another step in making the process of designing systems more dependable.

NASA honored Hamilton with the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003, acknowledging her contributions to software development and granting her the biggest financial prize that the agency had ever awarded to one person until that time-$37,200. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the Medal of Freedom, noting that "her example speaks of the American spirit of discovery that exists in every little girl and little boy who know that somehow to look beyond the heavens is to look deep within ourselves."

Hamilton's work may not be widely known to those outside the scientific community, though her achievements have been memorialized with the 2017 introduction of a Lego Margaret Hamilton action figure, part of the Women of NASA collection. It portrays Hamilton as a small, big-haired, bespectacled hero whose Apollo code stacked up to be taller than she was. The National Air and Space Museum now holds the prototypes for these action figures. Software engineers are not generally viewed as courageous action figures, but Hamilton is no stranger to the bravery required for heroism. She remembers "being fearless, even when the experts say: 'No, this doesn't make sense,' they didn't believe it, nobody did. It was something that we were dreaming of happening, but it became real."

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Margaret Hamilton Led the NASA Software Team That Landed Astronauts on the Moon

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On July 20, 1969, as the lunar module, Eagle, was approaching the moon's surface, its computers began flashing warning messages. For a moment Mission Control faced a "go / no-go" decision, but with high confidence in the software developed by computer scientist Margaret Hamilton and her team, they told the astronauts to proceed.

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Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. She made her journey into history on June 18, 1983. Throughout her life, Dr. Ride broke barriers and worked to ensure that girls and women were encouraged to do the same.

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Bessie Coleman wanted more out of life. Her parents were sharecroppers in rural Texas, and she had spent her childhood picking cotton and doing laundry for white people. It was 1915. Opportunities were scarce for African Americans-let alone women of color. If Coleman wanted more, she realized, she had to go north. She moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration and took a job at a barbershop. In her free time, Coleman began to read about flying.

She read about Harriet Quimby, the first American woman to earn a pilot's license. She learned of the European women who served as combat pilots during World War I. Inspired by their stories, Coleman resolved to become an aviator. She applied to every flying school in the United States, but, because of widespread race and gender discrimination, she was rejected from all of them.

Coleman refused to take no for an answer. She found sponsorship from the black-owned newspaper The Chicago Defender, taught herself French, and moved to France. She earned her license from France's lauded Caudron Brother's School of Aviation in just seven months. specializing in stunt flying and parachuting. In 1921, Coleman became the first black woman to earn a pilot's license.

A new short documentary from PBS's American Masters series revives the story of the daredevil aviatrix whom history forgot. The film, part of a larger series about pioneering American women called Unladylike2020, illuminates Coleman's achievements through interviews and colorful animation.

"Like many Americans, the only woman pilot I had ever heard of was Amelia Earhart," Charlotte Mangin, who produced the film, told me. "I certainly never imagined that a woman of color was able to obtain a pilot's license in the 1920s, let alone take the country by storm as an aviator."

What surprised Mangin most about Coleman, however, was the spirit of activism that the pilot brought to her flying shows. "She refused to perform in air shows where African Americans were not allowed to use the front entrance and sit in the stadium with white spectators," Mangin said. "I can only imagine the courage and determination it took to be an activist in this way, at a time when discrimination and violence against people of color were rampant across America."

At age 34, Coleman's life was cut short in a plane crash caused by an engine malfunction. Ida B. Wells spoke at her funeral service. In 1929, Coleman's dream of opening a flying school for African Americans became a reality when William J. Powell established the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles. The school educated and inspired many outstanding black pilots, including the Five Blackbirds and the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II.

Today, only 7 percent of all pilots in the U.S. are women; less than 1 percent are black women.

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The Daredevil Aviatrix That History Forgot

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Bessie Coleman wanted more out of life. Her parents were sharecroppers in rural Texas, and she had spent her childhood picking cotton and doing laundry for white people. It was 1915. Opportunities were scarce for African Americans-let alone women of color. If Coleman wanted more, she realized, she had to go north.

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Lee, the first female police captain in the U.S., is considered the "mother of forensic science" and helped to found the first-of-its kind Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University when the field of forensics was in its infancy. At the time, there was very little training for investigators, meaning that they often overlooked or mishandled key evidence, or irrevocably tampered with crime scenes. Few had any medical training that would allow them to determine cause of death. As Lee and her colleagues at Harvard worked to change this, tools were needed to help trainees scientifically approach their search for truth. Lee was a talented artist as well as criminologist, and used the craft of miniature-making that she had learned as a young girl to solve this problem. She constructed the Nutshells beginning in the 1940s to teach investigators to properly canvass a crime scene to effectively uncover and understand evidence. The equivalent to "virtual reality" in their time, her masterfully crafted dioramas feature handmade objects to render scenes with exacting accuracy and meticulous detail.

Every element of the dioramas-from the angle of miniscule bullet holes, the placement of latches on widows, the patterns of blood splatters, and the discoloration of painstakingly painted miniature corpses-challenges trainees' powers of observation and deduction. The Nutshells are so effective that they are still used in training seminars today at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore.

Showcasing the Nutshells at the Renwick allows visitors to appreciate them as works of art and material culture in addition to understanding their importance as forensic tools, and to see Lee's genius for telling complex stories through the expressive potential of simple materials. While the Nutshells represent composites of real and extremely challenging cases featuring homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths, Lee imagined and designed each setting herself. She was both exacting and highly creative in her pursuit of detail-knitting tiny stocking by hand with straight pins, hand-rolling tiny tobacco-filled cigarettes and burning the ends, writing tiny letters with a single-hair paintbrush, and creating working locks for windows and doors.

The exhibition also highlights the subtly subversive quality of Lee's work, especially the way her dioramas challenge the association of femininity with domestic bliss and upend the expected uses for miniature making, sewing, an other crafts considered to be "women's work." Also evident is her purposeful focus on society's "invisible victims," whose cases she championed. Lee was devoted to the search for truth and justice for everyone, and she often featured victims such as women, the poor, and and people living on the fringes of society, whose cases might be overlooked or tainted with prejudice on the part of the investigator. She wanted trainees to recognize and overcome any unconscious biases and to treat each case with rigor, regardless of the victim.

As the Nutshells are still active training tools, the solutions to each remain secret. However, the crime scene "reports" (written by Lee to accompany each case) given to forensic trainees are presented alongside each diorama to encourage visitors to approach the Nutshells the way an investigator would.

Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death is the first public display of the complete series of nineteen studies still known to exist. For the first time since 1966, 18 pieces on loan to the museum from the Harvard Medical School via the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, will be reunited with the "lost nutshell," on loan from the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, courtesy of the Bethlehem Heritage Society. The exhibition is organized by Nora Atkinson, The Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft.

Lee's hyperreal constructions inspired contemporary artist and scenic designer Rick Araluce, whose immersive, large-scale installation is presented in the adjoining gallery. Rick Aracluce: The Final Stop opens concurrently with Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death on October 20th.

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Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

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Lee, the first female police captain in the U.S., is considered the "mother of forensic science" and helped to found the first-of-its kind Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University when the field of forensics was in its infancy.

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The "world's most honored woman astrophysicist" worked tirelessly for decades to measure the makeup of the sun and the stars

smithsonianmag.com

Charlotte Moore could smell the coal burning in the furnace below her back-room workspace at the Princeton University Observatory. With a meager starting salary of $100 per month, she worked as a "computer" for the famous astronomer Henry Norris Russell, helping with calculations to describe how stars evolve and what kinds of materials burn inside them. Her boss's mind seemed to run too quickly for anyone to follow, and the short, quiet woman he hired fresh out of college in 1920 was initially overwhelmed.

"I felt that he must think that I was the most ignorant person that ever showed up at his house," she told space historian David DeVorkin in 1978.

At a time when few women had opportunities in the physical sciences, and fewer still received recognition for their efforts, Charlotte Moore Sitterly, as she was known after her marriage, was a pioneer in a field that has touched nearly all scientific disciplines: spectroscopy. The study of how matter interacts with light, including at wavelengths invisible to the human eye, transformed not only astronomy, but also physics, chemistry and optics, enabling a broad range of technologies.

Every element on the periodic table has a unique "fingerprint" of lines in the rainbow or "spectrum" that becomes visible when the element emits or absorbs light. Scientists can use these fingerprints to identify different materials, even in distant objects like stars. Moore Sitterly's efforts led to a greater understanding of the structures of atoms and their spectral lines, giving scientists the tools to dissect the contents of the universe.

By organizing this information about elemental fingerprints into handy reference tables, the bashful employee, and later colleague, of Henry Russell provided invaluable tools for astronomers and scientists at large. Her 1945 publication "A Multiplet Table of Astrophysical Interest" is still cited today as a reference for astronomers exploring everything from the rocky stuff of meteors to the plasmas of giant stars.

"She certainly made an enormous contribution to stellar spectroscopy, and our understanding of stars and our ability to analyze them," says Virginia Trimble, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.

Early Days

Charlotte Moore Sitterly was born in 1898 to a poor Quaker family in rural Pennsylvania, in a town called Ercildoun. She substitute taught while earning her undergraduate degree at Swarthmore College because, as she told DeVorkin, "Substitute teaching and tutoring were the two fields in which a woman could get some money toward working her way through college; almost everything else favored the men."

The head of Swarthmore's math department learned that Russell, at Princeton, was looking for an assistant to help measure and calculate the properties of stars. He recommended Moore Sitterly, still in her early 20s, and she agreed to work for Russell prior to meeting him-there was no interview.

Russell had already distinguished himself as a world leader in astrophysics when Moore Sitterly arrived at Princeton. As he collected awards in the early 1920s, he had a lot of tasks for Moore Sitterly-enough for three people, it seemed. His first letter to her, now housed among other correspondence at the Princeton University Library's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, mentions that she'd do "computations to be performed under my direction, including also the measurement of astronomical photographs. Determinations of the position of the Moon, in accordance with the plan developed by cooperation between this Observatory and Harvard, will form an important part of this work."

In practice, she also worked on spectroscopy and calculating the masses of stars, especially double-star systems. Russell needed Moore Sitterly's calculating and editing skills, and he was easily distracted and excited by many ideas, according to DeVorkin, who wrote the biography Henry Norris Russell in 2000. Russell could ramble for hours, and Moore Sitterly helped him focus.

"What she knew was that Russell was very consistently brilliant in his work, and that she saw herself as organizing that brilliance in the areas that she was involved in, and helping to make it more systematic," says DeVorkin, who is now a senior curator in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's space history department.

No matter how hard she worked, Princeton would not consider Moore Sitterly for a PhD-in fact, a woman would not enter any Princeton graduate program until 1961. "I was used to prejudice against women because Princeton was a man's stronghold, and a woman was really out of step there," she said in a 1981 interview with the National Bureau of Standards.

Within her first couple of years at Princeton, Moore Sitterly became chronically ill, perhaps because of the coal fumes and the strenuous nature of the work-though she wrote in an appreciative letter to Russell from a hospital in 1922: "Please do not think for one moment you that you are in any way responsible for this illness."

For the sake of her health, in 1925, Moore Sitterly asked Russell for a leave of absence and headed westward to work with astronomers on spectra of the sun at Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles. She continued collaborating with Russell, who visited once a year. In February 1926, she wrote to him, "If there is any work I can do for you, please don't hesitate to ask me." In July, she was surprised that he had left his own name off of a publication about the relative position of the moon-the results of her very first Princeton assignment-but kept hers. "When I think of the many difficulties you helped me out of, I don't think you have been quite fair to yourself and have given me far too much credit," Moore Sitterly wrote.

When her position at Mount Wilson was up for renewal, Moore Sitterly delicately sought Russell's approval to stay in a handwritten letter dated September 6, 1926:

You probably have realized that the time has come to consider a position for next year, as my appointment here expires on January 1, 1927. I feel that it would be very unfair for me to make any plans without consulting you and also I value your advice very much indeed.

The solar spectrum work is just well started and I hate to start something I cannot finish. Also I feel that it would be very unwise to consider coming east in January, for these two reasons I think I should stay here a while longer, at least. The position is open to me and I think I shall stay at present.

I feel in an awkward position here, as you can imagine, and I think [Mount Wilson director] Dr. [Walter] Adams does, also. On the other hand, I should feel very badly if they flatly refused to consider a reappointment, after you had recommended me, for I have tried my very best not to be any discredit to you, although of course I am entirely unable to measure up to you in ability.

Later, when Russell took his family for a sabbatical in Europe in 1929, Moore Sitterly saw an opportunity to complete a PhD-and unlike Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, would admit women for doctorate degrees. Using data from the Mount Wilson 150-foot solar telescope, she studied the atomic spectral lines of sunspots, deducing that the temperature of these features was about 4,700 degrees Kelvin.

Russell still visited. According to a Carnegie Observatories yearbook from 1929-1930: "Dr. Henry Norris Russell, Research Associate, spent two months in Pasadena during the autumn of 1930 and devoted especial attention to a study of the results of an analysis of the line-spectrum of sun-spots made by Miss Moore."

Moore Sitterly sent Russell the program for her final oral examination in 1931, as well as a telegram saying she'd passed, and Russell heartily congratulated her on the achievement. But Moore Sitterly wrote back that she was nervous "as usual" and that a professor expressed annoyance at her during the exam: "He said he could not make me state the simplest facts because I always went to something much more complex and complicated than they wanted. He said it was very obvious that I had never taught."

Although the Mount Wilson astronomers highly regarded Moore Sitterly, Russell badly wanted her back at Princeton. He wrote to her in October 1930: "By all means don't do anything about any other position until I see you. We have been expecting all along to have you come back here and I don't see how we can get on without you."

She did return to Russell in 1931, and although their decades-long correspondence reflects a cordial relationship, she once said that the best thing about going to Princeton was meeting her husband, according to a relative of hers through marriage, Michael Duncan. And Moore Sitterly told DeVorkin in 1978 that if she had met Russell in an interview, she might not have gone to work for him in the first place. But in her characteristic modest way, she clarified the remark by saying her work at Princeton "might have been done better by somebody else."

Although Moore Sitterly became a close friend of the Russell family, she addressed the famous astronomer as "Dr. Russell" in all of her letters to him, while by 1940 he had started writing "Dear Charlotte."

The Multiplet Tables

Promoted at Princeton from "computer" to "research assistant," and later "research associate," Moore Sitterly worked on a project in the 1930s that would become part of her legacy: the multiplet tables. A multiplet table is like an encyclopedia of atomic elements, their possible electron states as well as the wavelengths that correspond to the elements emitting or absorbing single particles of light.

"Russell was fascinated with the various rules and theories about how atoms emit and absorb light, and what you can learn physically about a star that has those kinds of spectral lines in it," DeVorkin says. "She was the one who could take some of those ideas, but turn them into actual practice."

Inspired by Russell's own limited spectral tables, Moore Sitterly saw the need for a comprehensive index, and she took pride in its execution. "I refuse to let anyone else assemble the table for me, because it is a mean job and one that requires infinite care," she wrote to Russell in October 1931.

This "mean job" turned out to be of great consequence for the advancement of science. "The multiplet table is a key step between what you see and what you're going to analyze," Trimble says. "What she did was essential for stellar astronomy."

Yet Russell was reluctant to publish such an ambitious effort. Moore Sitterly said in 1981 that Russell thought this comprehensive spectral index was "probably not the right thing to do. ... I think he worried about keeping it up to date, but he never told me exactly why."

Moore Sitterly persisted, and she persuaded Russell to agree to a "trial edition" in the early 1930s, DeVorkin writes in his biography of Russell. The 250 copies went quickly. Still, while scientists used the multiplet table to make progress in unpacking the sun's composition, Russell thought there were too many unidentified lines in the solar spectrum to justify a second printing.

The revised edition finally came out in 1945 "on very poor paper and very cheaply," Moore Sitterly said in 1981. But it was in very high demand. "Everybody wanted it, and I remember that one day when Dr. Russell came in, he was the most surprised person; and it was sincere," she said.

Russell also had initial misgivings about Moore Sitterly's marriage to astronomer Bancroft Sitterly, she said in her 1978 interview with DeVorkin. "Banny," as he was known, had been a student of Russell's, and he knew Charlotte since the 1920s. Russell was "upset" about their 1937 marriage, possibly because he thought it would mean losing Moore Sitterly as a researcher.

But she continued working part-time for Russell, even while living in Cambridge so her husband could work at MIT on "top secret" assignments during World War II. Moore Sitterly commuted to Princeton often and worked on the spectra of elements such as neutral iron during this time, although officially she "wasn't allowed to know" why. While her work's specific applications to the war effort are unknown, atomic spectroscopy was important for a wide range of applications, including the Manhattan Project.

A New Era for Measuring Light

With Russell about to retire, Moore Sitterly was invited in 1945 to begin a new position at the National Bureau of Standards, which now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, then headquartered in Washington, D.C. Russell acknowledged her resignation from Princeton in a reverential letter dated October 23, 1945:

During the twenty years and more of your connection with us, you have done excellent work which has added greatly to the distinction of the Observatory, in addition to securing for yourself a permanent place in the history of American astrophysics. Not only the quality of this work deserves formal record, but your indefatigable energy and faithful devotion to the work. You have habitually gone well beyond the line of duty and the quality of the work has been greatly the gainer. Your exceptional accuracy in detail has been invaluable in the preparation of our spectroscopic work, above all in the great Revised Multiplet Table, but I gratefully acknowledge the immense help which you have given me in the preparation of papers of my own in earlier years.

In her new job, Moore Sitterly insisted that she continue working on solar spectra as a condition of employment. Her work on the composition of the sun "is really what I enjoy most," she said in 1981.

Until this point, all Moore Sitterly could learn about the sun's composition came from telescopes on the surface of the Earth. She did not have access to tools that could dissect all of the sun's ultraviolet rays, which are mostly blocked by the atmosphere. But in 1946, scientists led by Richard Tousey at the Naval Research Laboratory captured the sun's ultraviolet spectra using a V-2 rocket. This experiment sparked a decades-long collaboration between Moore Sitterly and Tousey. She published the "Ultraviolet Multiplet Table" in 1950.

"She recalled a day long ago in Princeton, when she and Russell and others were discussing what the ultraviolet solar spectrum would look like," Vera Rubin, an astronomer who found groundbreaking evidence of dark matter's existence, wrote of Moore Sitterly in 1991 in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage. "They had fun guessing, but concluded that they would never live to see it, because no one could build a spectrograph stable enough."

But in Moore Sitterly's first years at the Bureau of Standards, the new ultraviolet work had to remain a side project. She received the massive assignment of assembling a comprehensive index of how different atoms and their electron orbitals are structured. The publication, "Atomic Energy Levels," attracted the attention of Niels Bohr, who wrote her a congratulatory letter on the 1949 publication, as well as Linus Pauling, who asked her for information about the ionization potentials of heavy elements, and also thanked her for the volume, in 1950. "When may we expect to have Volume 2?" he asked. The answer turned out to be 1952-and then 1958 for Volume 3.

"Without climbing into a space capsule, indeed without even leaving her desk, tiny Dr. Charlotte Moore Sitterly is blazing a path to the fiery sun," a 1951 Associated Press article declared. She was described as a "spare, bespectacled lady with probing gray eyes," although the reporter incorrectly states that Moore Sitterly earned her PhD at Princeton.

Moore Sitterly's correspondence with Russell continued frequently long after her move to the National Bureau of Standards. Each extended invitations to the other, including to stay at each other's homes while in town to discuss scientific work. They wrote of their spouses and their vacations. Russell gave news of his children and grandchildren, and reported when someone was ill. Moore Sitterly even brought Russell to Washington to consult on questions of atomic spectra. Later, in a 1977 speech, she joked: "When he came it was I who presented him with his schedule of work."

Their long professional relationship lasted until Russell died in 1957. "Only three weeks before his death, H.N.R. was discussing with me the electron configurations of the rare-earth elements," she wrote 20 years later.

Moore Sitterly went to work with Tousey's group at the Naval Research Laboratory from 1971 to 1978, while still maintaining an office at the Bureau of Standards. She continued analyzing new data from V-2 rockets and later Skylab, the first U.S. space station, to further her understanding of the solar spectrum.

Moore Sitterly's painstaking cataloging has served countless scientists over the last several decades. Her work influenced the development of lasers and the beginnings of quantum mechanics, says Michael Duncan, professor of chemistry at the University of Georgia and a relative of Moore Sitterly through marriage.

To Duncan, Moore Sitterly was always "Aunt Charlotte." He would stay with her when he visited Washington in the 1980s, and he remembers her as a short, friendly grandmother figure who made great cherry pie, and would sometimes ask him to trim the bushes.

She was also frugal, Duncan says-even reusing coffee grounds from one day to the next-which likely stemmed from her humble beginnings in Pennsylvania. With no children of her own, she would spend holidays with Duncan's wife's family, and give everyone the soap that she had made in her basement for Christmas. She was also very interested in the history of her family.

"Like she did with the atomic tables, she was just meticulous at getting all the details and everything organized and worked out, and so she made and published a genealogy of the Moore family," Duncan says.

DeVorkin still remembers the day in 1978 when he visited Moore Sitterly for an American Institute of Physics interview. He went around her craftsman cottage on Brandywine Avenue in Washington to find her on the back porch. After he moved to the city in 1980, he would occasionally take Moore Sitterly to meetings.

"I certainly had a feeling that she was very dynamic, very persistent and very clear-headed," he says.

Moore Sitterly published her last collection of atomic tables in 1985, just shy of her 87th birthday. She died in 1990 before she could receive the prestigious Bruce Medal for lifetime achievement from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in person. This last accolade came with the title of "The world's most honored woman astrophysicist."

As academic institutions reckon with what MSNBC's Rachel Maddow dubbed "dude walls" -rows of portraits of white male scholars, particularly scientists-Moore Sitterly remains a rare counterexample, a woman who pushed science forward and received many awards in her lifetime. At Princeton, the astrophysics building has been moved downhill and built anew since young Charlotte's days working above the coal furnace. Still, her face remains absent from the pictures of luminaries, including Russell, that watch over new generations of students chasing secrets hidden in the light of the universe.

About Elizabeth Landau

Elizabeth Landau is a science writer and editor who lives in Washington, D.C. She holds degrees from Princeton University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Read more from this author | Follow @lizlandau

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How Charlotte Moore Sitterly Wrote The Encyclopedia of Starlight

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smithsonianmag.com Charlotte Moore could smell the coal burning in the furnace below her back-room workspace at the Princeton University Observatory. With a meager starting salary of $100 per month, she worked as a "computer" for the famous astronomer Henry Norris Russell, helping with calculations to describe how stars evolve and what kinds of materials burn inside them.

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By the end of her mission in February, Koch will have spent 328 days in space

smithsonianmag.com

On her 289th day at the International Space Station, astronaut Christina Koch set the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman.

The previous record was set by former station commander Peggy Whitson, who crewed the ISS in 2016-17. Koch, an electrical engineer from Livingston, Montana, arrived at the ISS in early March, where she has conducted scientific research on simulated lunar soil, called regolith, and 3D printing of biological tissues. The milestone isn't Koch's first; just a few months ago, she took part in the first all-female spacewalk.

"I think that highlighting it was the first all-female EVA, [or] spacewalk, is important because seeing those milestones be broken tells people where we are at and where we think the importance lies," Koch tells 's Robert Pearlman. "I think it is inspiring because future space explorers do need to see people who remind them of themselves."

After receiving her bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and physics from North Carolina State University, Koch graduated from the NASA Academy program and worked at Goddard Space Flight Center. She also completed research at the South Pole and in Greenland, and designed instruments for probes orbiting Jupiter and Earth, News & Observer 's Ashad Hajela and Kate Murphy report.

Space flight, however, has been a lifelong ambition. As her younger sister told the News & Observer, "It's something she always wanted and she's always been really focused on."

The world record for the longest spaceflight is held by Valery Polyakov, a cosmonaut whose 438-day mission was spent on Russia's space station in 1994 and 1995, Pearlman reports.

Koch will remain on the space station through February, at which point she will have been in spaceflight for a total of 328 days. At that point, she'll be less than two weeks short of the longest space flight by a U.S. astronaut, a 340-day trip completed by Scott Kelly over the course of 2015 and 2016. Like Kelly's mission, which compared the astronaut's vitals to his identical twin's over the course of their time in space, the sheer duration of Koch's stay at the ISS provides a valuable opportunity for research.

Likewise, it's important to understand how space affects both male and female bodies in order to make space exploration safer for all future astronauts. (This lesson was demonstrated earlier this year when the first all-female spacewalk was initially postponed due to limited access to properly-fitting spacesuits for the women on board the ISS at the time.) As NASA's Artemis program looks toward extended stays on the moon, including landing the first woman on the lunar surface, and eventually trips to Mars, it's increasingly important to study the long-term effects of microgravity on human health. "It is a wonderful thing for science," Koch said in a press conference.

Reflecting on her achievement, she tells Space 's Pearlman, "I like to think of the record as not so much about how many days you're up here, but what you bring to each day, so [it is] another great reminder to just bring your best."

But Koch doesn't want to hold the record for long, emphasizing that she'd like to see more female astronauts spend extended stays on the ISS, Koch explains to CNN 's Christi Paul.

"My biggest hope for the record is that it's exceeded as soon as possible," she says.

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Astronaut Christina Koch Breaks Record for Longest Spaceflight by a Woman

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smithsonianmag.com On her 289th day at the International Space Station, astronaut Christina Koch set the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman. The previous record was set by former station commander Peggy Whitson, who crewed the ISS in 2016-17.

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This Bioplastic Made From Fish Scales Just Won the James Dyson Award

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British product designer Lucy Hughes has invented a biodegradable plastic made from fish offcuts

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Four years ago, the mathematician Maria Chudnovsky faced an all-too-common predicament: how to seat 120 wedding guests, some of whom did not get along, at a dozen or so conflict-free tables. Luckily, the problem fell squarely in her realm of expertise. She conceived of the guests as nodes in a network, with links between incompatible nodes. Her task was to color in the nodes using a spectrum of colors representing the different tables. As long as connected nodes never had the same color, there would be no drama at the reception.

As a master of this pursuit, known as "graph coloring," Chudnovsky did the whole thing in her head and finished the seating chart in no time. "My husband was very impressed," she said.

Networks of related objects, be they nodes or wedding guests, are known to mathematicians as "graphs," and graph coloring is the much-studied act of partitioning these objects into conflict-free sets. Most graphs, with their tangle of interconnections, are impossible to color with a limited palette. The larger they are, the more colors you need. Moving from node to node, alternating between colors, you inevitably get into traffic jams that force you to pull new hues out of the box. Likewise, in the real world, seating charts, meeting schedules and delivery routes can seldom be made optimal. But since the 1960s, mathematicians have escaped these coloring frustrations by working with so-called perfect graphs, which "behave very nicely with respect to coloring," said Chudnovsky, a 38-year-old math professor at Princeton University.

Perfect graphs are, by definition, colorable with the most limited palette possible. When coloring a graph, every node in a mutually connected cluster, or "clique," must receive a distinct color, so any graph needs at least as many colors as the number of nodes in its largest clique. In most graphs, you need many more colors than this. But in perfect graphs, you do not. As the French graph theorist Claude Berge defined them in 1961, perfect graphs require a number of colors exactly equal to the size of their largest clique. The "chromatic number" must also equal the "clique number" for every subset of a perfect graph formed by deleting some of its nodes. This perfection rarely arises in the real world, but the property has made perfect graphs much easier to analyze and prove theorems about than their imperfect counterparts.

Yet, after half a century, an obvious question about perfect graphs remains unanswered: How do you actually color them? "Perfect graphs are the graphs that are designed to work well for coloring, so it's really annoying that we don't know a good way to color perfect graphs," said Paul Seymour, a graph theorist also at Princeton. "For a mathematician, a problem like that is a magnet. You want to be able to fix the issue."

Now, Chudnovsky and collaborators are taking significant steps toward a theorem for coloring all perfect graphs. They have spent the past few years "nibbling off different pieces of the pie," said Alan Tucker, a mathematician at Stony Brook University, proving coloring theorems for ever-larger subclasses of perfect graphs. This month, in their most general result yet, Chudnovsky, together with Irene Lo, Frédéric Maffray, Nicolas Trotignon and Kristina Vušković, posted a theorem for coloring all perfect graphs except those containing tricky arrangements of four nodes called "squares." "It gives confidence that the general case might be solved," said Gérard Cornuéjols, a mathematician at Carnegie Mellon University.

The hope is that history might repeat itself. Fifteen years ago, researchers raced to prove a theorem establishing the recipe for perfect graphs. After Cornuéjols, Vušković and Michele Conforti proved the theorem for "square-free" perfect graphs in 2001, "the general case came next," Chudnovsky said.

It was in 2002 that Chudnovsky along with Seymour, then her Ph.D. advisor, and two more collaborators proved the "strong perfect graph theorem" establishing what it takes to be a perfect graph. Their proof, which was published in the Annals of Mathematics in 2006, filled 150 pages. But the strong perfect graph theorem provides a surprisingly simple recipe for perfection: As Berge correctly guessed 54 years ago, a graph is perfect when it does not contain any arrangements of five or more nodes called "odd holes" or "odd antiholes."

An odd hole is a closed-loop path through part of a graph that passes through an odd number of nodes. (If you drew the graph on paper and cut along this path with scissors, you would cut a hole in the paper.) In an odd antihole, the nodes are connected to all but their nearest neighbors, forming a star-like shape. To see why these oddities render graphs imperfect, consider, for instance, a "five-hole," which looks like a pentagon: Its clique number is two, since only pairs of consecutive nodes are connected. But try to color the five-hole using only two colors - alternating, for instance, between blue and green - and you soon get into trouble: The fifth node has a blue neighbor on one side and a green neighbor on the other. A third color is needed. (Three-holes, unlike larger odd holes, are allowed to exist in perfect graphs, because their clique number is three.)

Real-world graphs such as conference schedules, the Manhattan subway system or the human neural network typically contain odd holes, making the study of perfect graphs primarily an intellectual exercise. And yet, "the class of perfect graphs allows you to develop sophisticated techniques that you can use in other classes," said Vušković, a professor at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.

Even perfect graphs can be tremendously complex, demanding detailed consideration of each of their umpteen internal structures and seldom submitting to elegant, concise proofs. "The discrete pieces just don't yield to overall theories," Tucker said. In their new theorem for coloring all perfect graphs that lack squares (also known as "four-holes"), Chudnovsky, Lo, Maffray, Trotignon and Vušković took a "divide and conquer" approach, essentially breaking the graphs up into parts, coloring the parts, and then gluing them together again.

To color a given graph, their first step is to scour the graph for a structure called a "prism," which consists of a pair of three-holes connected to each other via three paths.

Next, depending on how the prism attaches to the rest of the graph, the researchers partition the graph into two parts, left and right, with a set of nodes serving as a hinge between them. In general, this hinge might contain a square, but because there are too many possible ways to color hinges with squares, the current proof leaves out these tricky cases.

If either the left or right part contains another prism within it, the researchers must break it up again, and so on until no more prisms remain. (Here, graphs with squares again cause trouble, requiring too many partitions for the coloring procedure to work efficiently.)

Once neither left nor right contain a prism, then they can be colored in. The researchers proved that there is an efficient procedure for coloring both the left part and hinge together and the right part and hinge together. Typically, the two different colorings of the hinge won't agree; a final step switches the colors of neighboring nodes until they match up.

Now, only cases with squares remain unsolved. Experts disagree about how close the researchers have come to a perfect graph coloring theorem. In Vušković's opinion, "The square-free case of perfect graphs retains all the structural complexity of the perfect graph. It's very close to the general case." Cornuéjols, on the other hand, said, "I think it's still a big step."

The five collaborators will meet in Grenoble, France, in December to discuss ways to generalize their proof.

"We did a good step, but there are many steps more to be done," said Trotignon, a mathematician and computer scientist at École Normale Superieure in Lyon, France. "My feeling now is that this problem will be solved. Before this step of square-free graphs, I would have said no."

If the researchers succeed in proving a theorem for coloring all perfect graphs, some say it would mark the end of an era. "To me, that's the last very big open question about them," Cornuéjols said.
Correction: This article was revised on October 20, 2015, to reflect that the mathematician Claude Berge was from France, not Hungary. This article was reprinted on Wired.com.

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Mathematicians Closer to Perfect Graph Coloring Theorem | Quanta Magazine

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Four years ago, the mathematician Maria Chudnovsky faced an all-too-common predicament: how to seat 120 wedding guests, some of whom did not get along, at a dozen or so conflict-free tables. Luckily, the problem fell squarely in her realm of expertise. She conceived of the guests as nodes in a network, with links between incompatible nodes.

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A Video to Watch: SpaceX Starlink Mission Narrated by A Female Engineer

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A Video to Watch: SpaceX Starlink Mission Narrated by A Female Engineer

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Nobel Prize in Physics!! (2020)

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Andrea Ghez, UCLA's Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics, today was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics.

Ghez shares half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel of UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. The Nobel committee praised them for "the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy." The other half of the prize was awarded to Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity."

In July 2019, the journal Science published a study by Ghez and her research group that is the most comprehensive test of Albert Einstein's iconic general theory of relativity near the monstrous black hole at the center of our galaxy. Although she concluded that "Einstein's right, at least for now," the research group is continuing to test Einstein's theory, which she says cannot fully explain gravity inside a black hole.

Ghez studies more than 3,000 stars that orbit the supermassive black hole. Black holes have such high density that nothing can escape their gravitational pull, not even light. The center of the vast majority of galaxies appears to have a supermassive black hole, she said.

"I'm thrilled and incredibly honored to receive a Nobel Prize in physics," said Ghez, who is director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group. "The research the Nobel committee is honoring today is the product of a wonderful collaboration among the scientists in the UCLA Galactic Center Orbits Initiative and the University of California's wise investment in the W.M. Keck Observatory.

"We have cutting-edge tools and a world-class research team, and that combination makes discovery tremendous fun. Our understanding of how the universe works is still so incomplete. The Nobel Prize is fabulous, but we still have a lot to learn."

"The UCLA community is exceedingly proud of Professor Ghez's achievements, including this extraordinary honor," Block said. "We are inspired by her research uncovering the secrets of our universe and its potential to help us better understand the cosmos."

David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said: "The discoveries of this year's Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects. But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research. Not only questions about their inner structure, but also questions about how to test our theory of gravity under the extreme conditions in the immediate vicinity of a black hole."

Ghez and her team have made direct measurements of how gravity works near a supermassive black hole - research she describes as "extreme astrophysics."

Einstein's general theory of relativity is the best description of how gravity works. "However, his theory is definitely showing vulnerability," Ghez said in 2019. "[A]t some point we will need to move beyond Einstein's theory to a more comprehensive theory of gravity that explains what a black hole is."

Less than two months after her publication in Science, she and her research group reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters the surprising finding that the supermassive black hole is having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust - and they do not yet understand why.

"We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole," she said at the time. "It's usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don't know what is driving this big feast."

In January 2020, her team reported the discovery of a new class of bizarre objects - objects that look like gas and behave like stars - at the center of our galaxy, not far from the supermassive black hole.

Ghez and her team conducted their research at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. They are able to see the impact of how space and time get comingled near the supermassive black hole, which is some 26,000 light-years away.

"Making a measurement of such fundamental importance has required years of patient observing, enabled by state-of-the-art technology," Richard Green, director of the National Science Foundation's division of astronomical sciences, said in 2019.

"Andrea is one of our most passionate and tenacious Keck users," Keck Observatory director Hilton Lewis said, also in 2019. "Her latest groundbreaking research is the culmination of unwavering commitment over the past two decades to unlock the mysteries of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy."

The National Science Foundation funded Ghez's research for the past 25 years. More recently, her research has also been funded by the W.M. Keck Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation, Lauren Leichtman and Arthur Levine, and Howard and Astrid Preston.

► Listen to Ghez's phone conversation with the chief scientific officer of Nobel Media

In 1998, Ghez answered one of astronomy's most important questions, helping to show that a supermassive black hole resides at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The question had been a subject of much debate among astronomers for more than a quarter of a century.

Ghez helped pioneer a powerful technology called adaptive optics, which corrects the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere in real time and opened the center of our galaxy as a laboratory for exploring black holes and their fundamental role in the evolution of the universe. With adaptive optics at the Keck Observatory, she and her colleagues have revealed many surprises about the environments surrounding supermassive black holes, discovering, for example, young stars where none were expected and a lack of old stars where many were anticipated.

In 2000, Ghez and her research team reported that for the first time, astronomers had seen stars accelerate around the supermassive black hole. In 2003, she and her team reported that the case for the Milky Way's black hole had been strengthened substantially and that all of the proposed alternatives could be excluded.

In 2005, Ghez and her colleagues took the first clear picture of the center of the Milky Way, including the area surrounding the black hole, at the Keck Observatory.

Ghez has earned numerous honors for her research, including election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she was the first woman to receive the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Crafoord Prize, and she was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008. In 2019, she was awarded an honorary degree by Oxford University.

She earned a bachelor's degree in physics from MIT in 1987 and a doctorate from Caltech in 1992, and she has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 1994. When she was young, she wanted to be the first woman to walk on the moon.

Ghez is the eighth UCLA faculty member to be named a Nobel laureate, joining Willard Libby (chemistry, 1960), Julian Schwinger (physics, 1965), Donald Cram (chemistry, 1987), Paul Boyer (chemistry, 1997), Louis Ignarro (physiology or medicine, 1998), Lloyd Shapley (economics, 2012) and J. Fraser Stoddart (2016). Stoddart was a Northwestern University faculty member when he received the honor, but much of the work for which he was recognized was conducted at UCLA from 1997 to 2008.

In addition, seven UCLA alumni have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Ghez is also the fourth woman to receive the physics prize, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018.

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Andrea Ghez wins 2020 Nobel Prize in physics

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Andrea Ghez, UCLA's Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics, today was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. Ghez shares half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel of UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

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Andrea Ghez: "It amazes me every time I go to the telescope"

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Andrea Ghez: Black-Hole Hunter Takes Aim at Einstein | Quanta Magazine

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The UCLA astrophysicist Andrea Ghez explains how tracking the movement of stars revealed the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

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ngozi ezike: illinois health official shaken by latest covid-19 surge - cnn

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Battle hardened Illinois health official is shaken by latest Covid-19 surge

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The scale of the Covid-19 pandemic is exposing the battle scars of the country's most hardened public health officials. Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike began to cry and paused her remarks during a Friday briefing.

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With a name like The STEM Laboratory, it's no surprise that we're obsessed with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) activities for kids.

These 50+ STEM projects are sure to keep little scientists engaged, learning and well-prepared for their STEM-filled future.

Get inspired below and then sign up for our 5 Day STEM Challenge!

Not only will you learn exactly how to plan and teach STEM like a pro - but we'll show you how to do it using supplies you already have in your storage closet. Score!

It's never been simpler (or faster!) to get everything in place. Hop over and join right here!
This post contains Amazon affiliate links.

Science Projects

There are countless science experiments for kids but these 14 projects are our hands-down favorites!

Make a mini model of the water cycle with just a Ziploc bag!

Turn your name into crystals!

Find out why the sky is blue. // Rookie Parenting

Test whether objects are magnetic. // The Measured Mom

Whip up some frothy, foamy toothpaste.

Pour ice that is warm to the touch but freezes.

Make one orange sink and another one float!

Pour a rainbow into a jar.

Capture fireworks in a jar using just a few common household supplies. // I Can Teach My Child

Go fishing for ice.

Learn about color mixing when you make water walk! // Parenting Chaos

Catch a cloud in a jar.

Build a sand volcano that really erupts. // Growing a Jeweled Rose

Play with Magnetic Slime. // Frugal Fun 4 Boys

Technology Activities

Build robots that really walk, talk and "think". // Amazon

Teach kids about coding!

Let kids have a little screen time playing 20 teacher-approved apps.

Program a set of kid-friendly robot friends: Dash and Dot. // Amazon

Or build a Kano computer! // Amazon

Engineering Projects

Solve a batch of LEGO challenge cards.

Fold paper into building blocks that really stack. // Babble Dabble Do

Use plastic cups and craft sticks to create four brilliant challenges. // Frugal Fun 4 Boys

Build with straws and tape. // Lemon Lime Adventures

Build structures with marshmallows and pretzels.

Design a pom pom drop that guides the pom pom from one paper towel roll to the next. // Coffee Cups and Crayons

Learn about bridges and then build your own. // Carrots are Orange

Make a craft stick catapult that really launches!

Try a classic! Organize an egg drop challenge. Can you build a structure that will keep the egg from breaking?! // Buggy and Buddy

Build a batch of exploding boomerangs. // I Can Teach My Child

Test the strength of a piece of paper. // Creekside Learning

Make a moveable pulley! // Carrots Are Orange

Work as a team to build with pipe cleaners and aluminum foil. // Housing a Forest

Math Activities

Practice counting with some truck playdough mats. // Pre Kinders

Or add googly eyes to monsters!

Teach kids about odd and even numbers with some hands-on activity sheets.

Clip 2-dimensional shapes. // The Measured Mom

Solve a batch of shape puzzles.

Use a Ziploc bag to solve addition problems on a number line. // Source unknown

Make a set of little math books. // Liz's Early Learning Spot

Solve hands-on addition problems with LEGOS!

Play a round of math fact Jenga.

Learn about fractions with some handy pizza clip cards.

Practice adding together a handful of coins.
Teach kids about AM and PM.
Learn about the multiplication rule of nine. // Shelley Gray Teaching

Now Let's Take Your STEM Centers to the Next Level

If you're ready to give your STEM centers a MAJOR boost, hop over and take our 5 Day Challenge!

Not only will you learn exactly how to plan and teach STEM like a pro - but how to do it using supplies you already have in your storage closet.

It's never been simpler (or faster!) to get everything in place.
Hop over and join right here!

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With a name like The STEM Laboratory, it's no surprise that we're obsessed with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) activities for kids. These 50+ STEM projects are sure to keep little scientists engaged, learning and well-prepared for their STEM-filled future. Get inspired below and then sign up for our 5 Day STEM Challenge!

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​This is why now, the most recent push is to go from STEM to STEAM (the "A" is for incorporating art). Of course I am all for this idea, since my biggest goal is blending math and creativity effectively, while retaining the mathematical rigor. I have pulled together a few ideas to help you get started in your own classroom.

WHY Add the "A"?

The NCBI tells us why it's necessary to add the "A". "While the demand for a strong STEM workforce continues to grow, there are challenges that threaten our ability to recruit, train, and retain such a workforce in a way that is effective and sustainable and fosters innovation. One way in which we are meeting this challenge is through the use of the arts in the training of scientists."

​Know that adding art into your lessons is not just for the fun of it, or to make your program look good. There is so much value you can add by incorporating art into your Science, Math, Engineering, or Technology curriculum.

Activating the "artistic" parts of the brain stimulates more creative problem-solving strategies.

Students who are more involved in art show more social awareness, flexibility, and collaboration.

Activities that require use of the WHOLE brain (the logical/analytical left brain and the emotional/creative right brain) help students build better mental connections while developing a well-rounded child.

Students who are engaged in STEAM are able to think about their choices, weigh the risks involved, and persist in creative problem solving.

Using STEAM lessons builds a focus on inquiry, process-based learning, collaboration, and hands-on exploration.

​Go here or here to read more facts about STEAM.

Incorporating the Arts

Here are some creative and engaging ways to incorporate art into your content in a PURPOSEFUL way. You do not have to worry about "sacrificing" precious instructional time by throwing in an art project just for the sake of doing art in class. Art class has infinite merits on its own, but these additions will fit right into your curriculum and offer an additional daily dose of art for your students!

1. Choice Boards / Project-Based Learning

If you are not already using choice boards in your classroom, you may want to give them a try. When you use project-based tasks, students have freedom to complete an activity or assessment in the way that best suits their individual learning preferences. When I create a choice board, I like to offer six options and allow students to choose three of the six to complete. Usually, most of the tasks involve some sort of art. Here are some sample ideas:

Create a comic strip that teaches the content.

Make a video that explains how ...

Write a story about the topic. Include ten facts.

Develop a visual way to present the information to a younger student.

Create a song, rap, or poem that incorporates ten facts from the lesson.

Make a game in which players practice the new concept.

2. Photo Scrapbooks
My middle schoolers loved making the Geometry Scrapbook Project! I gave out a list of key terms (vertical angles, parallel lines, isosceles triangle...), and the students had to find each in the "real world". They had to take photos and create a scrapbook!

There are plenty of other lessons where students can go on a real life scavenger hunt, as well. For example:

parabolas

solids, liquids, and gases

roots, stems, and leaves or the parts of a flower

reflections, rotations, translations, and dilations

​3. Graphic Design / Graphic Organizers in Your Content Area

Another fun idea is to have your students create their own visual representation of a concept, instead of passing out premade graphic organizers or study guides. They can develop a visual aid or infographic.

Check out this post for more about creating visual representations of key terms, or this post about infographics in the classroom.

4. Art-Based Assessment

A lot of classrooms already do this. If you have not done anything like this yet, try adding just one artistic assessment this year. Teachers have come up with great ideas over the years, from the typical 3-D cell model to a skeleton with all the bones labeled. Think about what unit in your curriculum could be assessed in a different way.

Maybe your genetics unit could have an alternative assessment in which students create a beautiful tree representing traits within a family.

Maybe your fractions unit could end with an artistic display where each student uses a material of their choosing (clay, paper, beads...) to represent three sets of equivalent fractions in different forms.

Remember that theater is an art as well! Can your class act out what they have learned? Get your own creative brain thinking and really take a look at your assessments.

5. An End Result to Display

Students love to create something beautiful if they know that you will display it for everyone to see (yes, even older kids)! My absolute favorites are giant constructions (using a compass and straightedge). This activity was such a motivator. I only taught constructions at the end of the year if there was enough time, and this truly motivated the kids to keep on pace all throughout the year. They were so excited to be one of the classes that got through everything and got to finish the last Geometry unit with the colored constructions they had seen in the hallway the previous year.

​Students completed a series of constructions on a large sheet of paper and ended up with a beautiful design. I then allowed them to erase whatever lines they wanted and color their design. They were each unique and looked great on the bulletin boards, and thoroughly helped their geometry skills!

​
​Another idea for a display-friendly activity in geometry is holiday ornaments made from polyhedron nets. Print out some nets for your students here. The students can decorate and then fold them to create 3-D ornaments. You can have them find volume and surface area as well.

6. Tweak a Current Project

During our Pre-Engineering class, we were learning how to write programs for the movement of our robots when one of the girls saw a picture showing that a pen could be gripped in the robot's claw arm. We tried it right away, and then developed a very simple pattern of movements that turned our robots into spirographs. We kept adjusting the code in the program to make different designs on the paper.

Try making adjustments to a current project in your own classroom. Do you have students model viruses on paper? Try giving them more freedom to display their work in a more artistic way if they wish.

Do you have your middle school classes draw out floor plans of houses when you study area and perimeter? Add to this project by having your students design a geometric rug with a certain area for the floor and dilating and rotating the artistic design on the rug to make a matching similar figure in a different orientation for a larger room.

7. Drawing FROM Famous Art

Find a famous artwork, song, or poem that portrays the concept your class is studying (tesselations by Escher, "Starry Night" for learning about stars) and ask students questions about the accuracy or content of the art. Ask your 5th graders which phase of the moon may be occuring in certain songs about the moon ("like a big pizza pie - That's AMORE!"). Ask your 10th graders to find a piece of famous art that contains a pair of congruent triangles.

Do you teach fractions? Have your students investigate some sheet music for a tune they are familiar with. Teach the basics of half notes and quarter notes. Ask them to make connections to the math behind the music or even write out the note values for another song they know based on the beats.

8. Swap out your traditional quiz with a creative "Create your Own Quiz" version

It is great to have your class come up with quiz questions as a review. Students have done it many times, and often they write more challenging questions than the teacher does! Your students may enjoy an artistic adaptation of this. Try having them create a simple color-by-number review activity for a partner instead.

​The image should be something representative of the content, and multiple choice answers can correspond to certain colors for regions of the picture. Your class will still be reviewing and writing questions about the same content, but they will also be thinking about what elements are most important to include in their picture. They can then swap and enjoy answering and coloring as a review activity.

9. Doodle Notes

In case you haven't heard, doodle notes provide tons of learning benefits! Students will integrate art while connecting the two brain hemispheres. This leads to better focus, memory, problem-solving skills, and even lower stress levels. Just check out t his post or go to doodlenotes.org to learn more.

If you want to try it out for free, you can download these "Engage Your Brain" Doodle Notes. It will help you teach your students about using the doodle note strategy and how their brain works!

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Strategies for Incorporating the Arts in STEM Classes

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Explore at Home!

Do you know that you can use common things found in your house or classroom to explore science? You don't need fancy or expensive lab equipment to do fun science experiments. You can demonstrate cool scientific principles and test out your ideas with everyday objects found all around you. Try one of these activities at home or school today!

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Do It Yourself Science - Carnegie STEM Girls

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Explore at Home! Do you know that you can use common things found in your house or classroom to explore science? You don't need fancy or expensive lab equipment to do fun science experiments. You can demonstrate cool scientific principles and test out your ideas with everyday objects found all around you.

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Nobel Lecture: Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

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Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier

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Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier

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This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two scientists who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans.

The award went jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens and Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, "for the development of a method for genome editing." They first showed that CRISPR-which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-could edit DNA in an in vitro system in a paper published in the 28 June 2012 issue of Science. Their discovery was rapidly expanded on by many others and soon made CRISPR a common too l in labs around the world. The genome editor spawned industries working on making new medicines, agricultural products, and ways to control pests.

Many scientists anticipated that Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute, who showed 6 months later that CRISPR worked in mammalian cells, would share the prize. The institutions of the three scientists are locked in a fierce patent battle over who deserves the intellectual property rights to CRISPR's discovery, which some estimate could be worth billions of dollars.

Chemistry Nobel: CRISPR

"The ability to cut DNA where you want has revolutionized the life sciences. The genetic scissors were discovered 8 years ago, but have already benefited humankind greatly," Pernilla Wittung Stafshede, a chemical biologist at the Chalmers University of Technology, said at the prize briefing.

CRISPR was also used in one of the most controversial biomedical experiments of the past decade, when a Chinese scientist edited the genomes of human embryos, resulting in the birth of three babies with altered genes. He was widely condemned and eventually sentenced to jail in China, a country that has become a leader in other areas of CRISPR research.

Although scientists were not surprised Doudna and Charpentier won the prize, Charpentier was stunned. "As much as I have been awarded a number of prizes, it's something you hear, but you don't completely connect," she said in a phone call with the Nobel Prize officials. "I was told a number of times that when it happens, you're very surprised and feel that it's not real."

At a press briefing today, Doudna noted she was asleep and missed the initial calls from Sweden, only waking up to answer the phone finally when a Nature reporter called. "She wanted to know if I could comment on the Nobel and I said, Well, who won it? And she was shocked that she was the person to tell me."

No previous science Nobel has been given to two women only. "It's great for especially younger women to see this and to see that women's work can be can be recognized, as much as men's," Doudna said. "I think for many women, there's a feeling that no matter what they do, their work will never be recognized as it might be if they were a man. And I'd like to see that change, of course, and I think this is a step in the right direction."

Doudna added that she used to get puzzled looks when she said she worked on a bacterial immune system. Bacteria use the original form of CRISPR to fend off viruses, slicing up their DNA. "I am so pleased that the [Nobel] award description led off with the bacterial adaptive immune response, which is a truly amazing system, thus highlighting how basic research is absolutely critical for medical applications," says CRISPR researcher Maria Jasin of the Sloan Kettering Institute.

Doudna and Charpentier-who is originally from France and at the time of the discovery worked at Umeå University-showed they could program a small strip of what they called "guide RNA" to carry a bacterial CRISPR-associated (Cas) enzyme to exact DNA sequences, allowing them to target specific genes. Cas then cuts the double-stranded DNA. In many cases, the DNA repair mechanism of the cell makes errors, which can cripple a gene-knocking out a gene in this fashion is an effective way to study its normal role. CRISPR also allows researchers to insert a new stretch of DNA at the cut site.

The ability to cut DNA where you want has revolutionized the life sciences.

Pernilla Wittung Stafshede, Chalmers University of Technology

Harvard University chemist George Church says the Nobel Committee made "a really great choice." Church published a study showing CRISPR could edit mammalian cells at the same time as Zhang, who previously was a postdoc in his lab. But Church doesn't think either of them were slighted by not being included in the prize. As he sees it, Charpentier and Doudna made a discovery, which is what the committee prefers to reward, and he and Zhang were inventors. "If anyone wants any tips on how not win a Nobel Prize, it's pretty easy," Church says. "I've carefully avoided all this kind of brouhaha by focusing on inventions." And, he says, Zhang is young. "Feng Zhang is so full of creative ideas that I have no doubt that he will get one or two in the future."

Erik Sontheimer, a CRISPR researcher at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, also endorses the Nobel committee decision. "The prize is not based on anything related to patent law," he says. He called Zhang being excluded "appropriate," noting that several other researchers, including Zhang's main collaborators and Church, helped show CRISPR could edit mammalian cells at roughly the same time. "I don't see that it would have been legitimate to single him out. It's always the case that there will be pieces [of a scientific advance] that cannot be recognized."

Tom Welton, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, said he was "hugely pleased to see that the Nobel committee has chosen to honor two leading women in active research." This year's prize is the first time any science Nobel has gone to an all-female team.

Many genome editors existed before CRISPR, but using them was time consuming, cumbersome, and expensive. CRISPR not only works with remarkable ease and speed, it is also the first editor that allows researchers to alter several genes in a single experiment. Rudolf Jaenisch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose group published one of the first studies of CRISPR-edited mice, said "any idiot can do it." (Watch this story's reporter fail at CRISPR, however.)

Rodolphe Barrangou, a researcher at North Carolina State University who began to use bacteria's CRISPR mechanism in 2007 to make yogurt cultures that were resistant to infection, says the prize is "a great opportunity to celebrate pioneers in the field." Doudna and Charpentier, he says, "developed an amazing technology that enabled the scientific community and democratized genome editing." He says before their work, "relatively few people cared about CRISPR."

Fyodor Urnov, a CRISPR researcher who works with Doudna, calls it "the most deserved Nobel Prize of the past 20 years." Doudna's and Charpentier's discovery "changed everything for the better," says Urnov, who previously worked on a more cumbersome gene editor called zinc fingers. "We can improve the world around us in extraordinary ways," he says, noting that a CRISPR application has already cured a person of sickle cell disease. "The 21st century will be the age of CRISPR-thanks to Jennifer and Emmanuelle."

Related content from Science and Science Advances

Related content from News from Science

E. Pennisi, " Beyond TALENs," Science (14 Dec 2012)

Sci. News Staff " Breakthrough of the year: The Runners-Up," Science (21 Dec 2012)

E. Pennisi, " The CRISPR Craze," Science (23 Aug 2013)

Sci. News Staff, " Breakthrough of the year: The Runners-Up-Genetic Microsurgery for the Masses," Science (20 Dec 2013)

J. Travis, " Germline editing dominates DNA summit," Science (11 Dec 2015)

J. Travis, " Making the cut," Science (18 Dec 2015)

Sci. News Staff, "Science's 2015 Breakthrough of the Year," Science (17 Dec 2005)

M. McNutt, " Editorial: Breakthrough to genome editing," Science (18 Dec 2015)

J. Cohen, " 'Base editors' open new way to fix mutations," Science (27 Oct 2017)

J. Couzin-Frankel, " CRISPR takes on cancer," Science (7 Feb 2020)

doi:10.1126/science.abf0540

Jon is a staff writer for Science.

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CRISPR, the revolutionary genetic 'scissors,' honored by Chemistry Nobel

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This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two scientists who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans.

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Frances H. Arnold in 2016. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work conducting the directed evolution of enzymes. Credit... Heikki Saukkomaa/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

* This story is from October 2018
Since 1901, when the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was first awarded, 177 people have captured the honor. On Wednesday, Frances H. Arnold became only the fifth woman to be awarded the prize.

Dr. Arnold, 62, an American professor of chemical engineering, bioengineering and biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, earned the award for her work with the directed evolution of enzymes.

She shared this year's chemistry Nobel - worth close to $1 million - with George P. Smith, 77, and Gregory P. Winter, 67. Dr. Arnold received half of the prize, and Dr. Smith and Dr. Winter split the other half.

Dr. Arnold won for her work conducting the directed evolution of enzymes, proteins that catalyze chemical reactions. She first pioneered the bioengineering method, which works similar to the way dog breeders mate specific dogs to bring out desired traits, in the early 1990s, and has refined it since then.

Her enzymes have been used to make biofuels, medicines and laundry detergent, among other things. In many processes, they have taken the place of toxic chemicals.
[On Tuesday, a woman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the third time ever.]
Dr. Smith was honored for developing a method, known as phage display, in which a virus that infects bacteria can be used to evolve new proteins. Dr. Winter won for evolving antibodies through phage display to combat autoimmune diseases and in some cases, cure metastatic cancer.

"I think of what I do as copying nature's design process," Dr. Arnold said in an interview with NobelPrize.org. "All this tremendous beauty and complexity of the biological world all comes about to this one simple beautiful design algorithm."

In the 1980s, Dr. Arnold tried to rebuild enzymes, but because they are very complex molecules built from different amino acids that can be infinitely combined, she found it difficult to remodel the enzymes' genes in order to give them new properties.

In the 1990s, she abandoned what she called her "somewhat arrogant approach" of trying to create modified enzymes through her logic and knowledge, and examined nature's way of doing things. She looked into evolution.

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Dr. Arnold with President Barack Obama at an award ceremony for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2013. Dr. Arnold was awarded the prize in 2011. Credit... Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

"I realized that the way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed failure," Dr. Arnold said. "To me it is obvious that this is the way it should be done."

She tried to change an enzyme called subtilisin. She wanted it to accelerate change in an organic solvent, so she created random mutations in the enzyme's genetic code and introduced the mutated genes to bacteria that then created different types of subtilisin.

Dr. Arnold selected the type of subtilisin that performed the best. Once she found the best variant of subtilisin, she continued to mutate it until she had the very best version.

With this directed evolution, she could show the power behind allowing chance and directed selection instead of depending on human logic and understanding of how genes and enzymes are supposed to work. This was the initial step toward the revolution in enzyme mutation.

When she began her new approach, "some people looked down their noses at it," Dr. Arnold told the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation. "They might say 'It's not science' or that 'Gentlemen don't do random mutagenesis.' But I'm not a scientist, and I'm not a gentleman, so it didn't bother me at all. I laughed all the way to the bank, because it works."

Now, Dr. Arnold said, these are some of the questions she would like to answer: "How do you evolve innovation? How do you get a whole new chemical activity that you don't know already existed? How can I evolve a whole new species of enzymes?"

Dr. Arnold was born on July 25, 1956, in Pittsburgh. In 1979 she received her undergraduate degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. She received her graduate degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985.

She started teaching at Caltech in 1986. In 2013 she became the director of the institution's Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center.

Only eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded to women in physics or chemistry. It is also the first time that women have been honored with a chemistry Nobel and a physics Nobel in the same year.

Dr. Arnold, speaking Wednesday at a news conference at Caltech, predicted that "a steady stream" of future Nobel Prizes in Chemistry would be given to women.

"It's just such a rich resource," she said. "And as long as we encourage everyone - it doesn't matter the color, gender; everyone who wants to do science, we encourage them to do it - we are going to see Nobel Prizes coming from all these different groups. Women will be very successful."

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Nobel Prize in Chemistry Goes to a Woman for the Fifth Time in History

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This story is from October 2018 Since 1901, when the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was first awarded, 177 people have captured the honor. On Wednesday, Frances H. Arnold became only the fifth woman to be awarded the prize.

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Tu Youyou has become the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize, for her work in helping to create an anti-malaria medicine. The 84-year-old's route to the honour has been anything but traditional.

Tu Youyou attended a pharmacology school in Beijing. Shortly after, she became a researcher at the Academy of Chinese Traditional Medicine.

In China, she is being called the "three noes" winner: no medical degree, no doctorate, and she's never worked overseas.

In 1967, Communist leader Mao Zedong decided there was an urgent national need to find a cure for malaria.

At the time, malaria spread by mosquitoes was decimating Chinese soldiers fighting Americans in the jungles of northern Vietnam.

A secret research unit was formed to find a cure for the illness.

Two years later, Tu Youyou was instructed to become the new head of Mission 523. She was dispatched to the southern Chinese island of Hainan to study how malaria threatened human health.

For six months, she stayed there, leaving her four-year-old daughter at a local nursery.

Ms Tu's husband had been sent away to work at the countryside at the height of China's Cultural Revolution, a time of extreme political upheaval.

Mission 523 pored over ancient books to find historical methods of fighting malaria.

When she started her search for an anti-malarial drug, over 240,000 compounds around the world had already been tested, without any success.

Finally, the team found a brief reference to one substance, sweet wormwood, which had been used to treat malaria in China around 400 AD.

The team isolated one active compound in wormwood, artemsinin, which appeared to battle malaria-friendly parasites.

The team then tested extracts of the compound but nothing was effective in eradicating the drug until Tu Youyou returned to the original ancient text.

After another careful reading, she tweaked the drug recipe one final time, heating the extract without allowing it to reach boiling point.

After the drug showed promising results in mice and monkeys, Tu Youyou volunteered to be the first human recipient of the new drug.

"As the head of the research group, I had the responsibility," she explained to the Chinese media. Shortly after, clinical trials began using Chinese labourers.

Tu Youyou is typically described in China as a "modest" woman. Her work was published anonymously in 1977, and for decades she received little recognition for her research with Mission 523.

In 2009, Ms Tu published an autobiography looking back on her scientific career. However, she was quickly attacked by some for claiming the spotlight while seemingly ignoring contributions from her colleagues.

Some allege that two other researchers had already targeted the compounds in sweet wormwood before Tu Youyou joined Mission 523.

However, she was the one who allegedly consulted the ancient text to study how best to extract the compound for use in medicine.

In any case, Tu Youyou is consistently cited for her drive and passion. One former colleague, Lianda Li, says Ms Tu is "unsociable and quite straightforward", adding that "if she disagrees with something, she will say it".

Another colleague, Fuming Liao, who has worked with Tu Youyou for more than 40 years, describes her as a "tough and stubborn woman".

Stubborn enough to spend decades piecing together ancient texts and apply them to modern scientific practices. The result has saved millions of lives.

More on this story

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Nobel Prize winner Tu Youyou helped by ancient Chinese remedy

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Tu Youyou has become the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize, for her work in helping to create an anti-malaria medicine. The 84-year-old's route to the honour has been anything but traditional. Tu Youyou attended a pharmacology school in Beijing. Shortly after, she became a researcher at the Academy of Chinese Traditional Medicine.

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Women have made great contributions to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. These fun children's books about women in STEM will help you explore those contributions with your kiddos.

Post contains affiliate links; see disclosure for additional details.
Some of these books highlight a group of women who made groundbreaking advances in STEM fields, yet some bring our attention to the story of a single woman in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.

Also, most of these books are geared toward kids of all ages. That said, some could be better enjoyed by older readers, as read alouds, or a little at a time. That preference, of course, will vary from child to child and book to book.

Regardless of what you're looking for today, all of these selections are engaging and inspiring ways to learn about women who used their gifts to make a difference in the world.

Children's Books About Women in STEM

Before we jump into the list, keep in mind that I didn't include any books that specifically celebrate women known for their work in space science. You can find those books and descriptions with my list of children's books about women in space.

And now, on to the books about women in STEM: 🙂

1. Women in Science

Women in Science is a great place to start when learning about women in STEM. This book covers 50 groundbreaking women scientists and shares their stories and accomplishments through well-written overviews and eye-catching design.

Born Curious is another children's book that features women in science. Similar in premise, it goes into more detail on each scientist and features 20 women scientists versus the 50 covered in Women in Science.

2. Girls Think of Everything

Similar to Women in Science and Born Curious, Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women covers a wide range of women inventors and their creations.

3. 101 Black Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

101 Black Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics celebrates 101 brilliant and inspiring women who have greatly impacted STEM fields despite the barriers they faced.

4. Nothing Stopped Sophie

Nothing Stopped Sophie shares the story of Sophie Germain, a French mathematician and physicist who inspired the Sophie Germain Prize at the French Academy of Sciences.

For older kids, consider Sophie's Diary. It'sa historical fiction option that's perfect for upper elementary, middle, and even young high school students.

5. Queen of Physics

Queen of Physics: How Wu Chien Shiung Helped Unlock the Secrets of the Atom tells the story of Wu Chien Shiung and her accomplishments in nuclear physics. Worth noting, a short biographical overview, glossary, and additional reading suggestions are included at the end of the book.

6. Lise Meitner: Had the Right Vision About Nuclear Fission

This book from Mike Venezia's Getting to Know the World's Greatest Inventors & Scientists series celebrates physicist Lise Meitner through Venezia's trademark (and often quirky) combination of cartoon-like illustrations and key biographical details.

7. Marie Curie for Kids

Marie Curie for Kids is a fantastic way to explore the life and work of Marie Curie. It includes her personal background, work in physics and chemistry, and 21 activities and experiments that add a hands-on component to the book.

Other children's books about Marie Curie include:

8. Instructions Not Included

Instructions Not Included: How a Team of Women Coded the Future introduces Betty Snyder, Jean Jennings, and Kay McNulty and their contributions to computer science during World War II.

9. Ada Lovelace, Poet of Science

There are several great picture books about the world's first computer programmer, but my daughter and I especially enjoyed Ada Lovelace, Poet of Science. Ada's story is interesting and inspiring on its own, but the fun and colorful illustrations make this book a joy to read.

For more on Ada Lovelace, consider the following titles:

10. Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code

Learn about computer scientist and United States rear admiral Grace Hopper with Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code:

"Who was Grace Hopper? A software tester, workplace jester, cherished mentor, ace inventor, avid reader, naval leader-AND rule breaker, chance taker, and troublemaker... Grace Hopper coined the term 'computer bug' and taught computers to 'speak English.' Throughout her life, Hopper succeeded in doing what no one had ever done before."
Amazon

11. The Girl With a Mind for Math

The Girl With a Mind for Math is a picture book about American naval engineer Raye Montague. I especially like the timeline, biography, and chat with Raye Montague all featured at the end of this picture book.

12. The World Is Not a Rectangle

Architecture is a great example of math, science, technology, and engineering coming together under one umbrella. That's why The World Is Not a Rectangle: A Portrait of Architect Zaha Hadid is a great one to add to your list of books about women in STEM.

Also worth noting, this Little People, BIG DREAMS book is an especially lovely way to explore Zaha Hadid's life and accomplishments with younger readers.

13. Secret Engineer

Have you ever heard how the Brooklyn Bridge came to be? Secret Engineer: How Emily Roebling Built the Brooklyn Bridge tells the story of the New York landmark and how a surprising supervisor stepped in and held the project together when her husband, the chief engineer, could no longer oversee it.

Can't find a copy of Secret Engineer? How Emily Saved the Bridge is another good picture book option about Emily Roebling and the Brooklyn Bridge.

14. Hedy Lamarr's Double Life

It's not every day you read about someone who has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but also developed technology used by the US Navy, right? That's what's so cool about Hedy Lamarr.

I wasn't familiar with this story until I came across Hedy Lamarr's Double Life, but it's one of my favorites from this list of children's books about women in STEM.

15. Marvelous Mattie

If you've ever used a paper bag from a grocery store, you've been impacted by Margaret E. Knight and her inventions. You can read her story in Emily Arnold McCully's Marvelous Mattie.

If you have trouble finding Marvelous Mattie, look for In the Bag! and Margaret Knight: Girl Inventor. Both are great picture book options that tell Margaret Knight's story.

Looking for more children's books about women who have changed the world? Here are some others to add to your reading list:

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What to Read: Children's Books About Women in STEM (Science, Technology Engineering, and Mathematics)

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Women have made great contributions to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. These fun children's books about women in STEM will help you explore those contributions with your kiddos. Post contains affiliate links; see disclosure for additional details.

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If Aisha Bowe had followed her guidance counselor's advice, she would be a cosmetologist...

Instead, Aisha is an aeronautical engineer and entrepreneur managing multi-million dollar defense contracts and private-sector technology clients. This unique combination has strengthened Aisha's commitment to evangelizing the power and unlimited future of science and technology for young women all over the world.

While she never pursued cosmetology professionally, Aisha is still a huge fan of beauty and fashion-especially when she is able to use technology to keep that love front and center.
Follow Aisha

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Aisha Bowe - Founder, CEO, and Aerospace Engineer

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If Aisha Bowe had followed her guidance counselor's advice, she would be a cosmetologist... Instead, Aisha is an aeronautical engineer and entrepreneur managing multi-million dollar defense contracts and private-sector technology clients. This unique combination has strengthened Aisha's commitment to evangelizing the power and unlimited future of science and technology for young women all over the world.

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Biography

A Trailblazing Aerospace Engineer Gives Back By Inspiring Others

In her lofty career as an aerospace engineer and instrument manager at NASA's prestigious Goddard Space Flight Center, Aprille Joy Ericsson has played a key role in designing spacecraft and instruments that contribute to our greater understanding of the Sun-Earth connection, space science and Earth itself. But her inspiration to pursue a life of science and engineering began as a youngster while viewing milestone NASA spacecraft launches on TV as well as participating in unforgettable science outreach experiences as a student.

Says Aprille: "There were several instances that fostered my interest during childhood: The first was watching the Apollo missions on TV in school in first grade; the second was me winning second place in the 8 th grade science fair where I built my first science instrument, and third, attending the MIT UNITE science outreach program for minority students (now called Minority Introduction to Engineering & Science, or MITES) which I participated in during the summer of my junior year in high school."

During the latter program, part of which took place at an Air Force Base in New Hampshire, she was able to sit in the aircraft control tower and fly in a flight simulator, even receiving a pilot's score. "This experience really led me to my decision to explore the aerospace field," she says.

Such episodes also motivated her in other trailblazing career achievements, including becoming the first African American female to receive a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Howard University (Washington, DC), and the first African American female at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to receive a Ph.D. in Engineering.

Aprille, who currently serves as the Goddard Space Flight Center's Program Manager for Small Business Innovative Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Research, is equally known today for her work to motivate other minority students in science and engineering. "Generally, I would say I am proof that one can achieve your career goals with meager resources," she says. "But to make STEM fields more diverse and inclusive of all students, we need to check our biases at the door in order to be open to people who are different from us, or who think differently from us."

Born the oldest of four daughters, Aprille grew up in New York City's Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, and later moved to Cambridge, MA where she lived with her grandparents and continued her schooling. "My mother and my grandfathers were particularly encouraging to me during this time," says Aprille. "Education and being the best you can be was very important to them." Graduating from high school with honors, Aprille entered college at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she earned a Bachelor's of Science degree in Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering. While an undergraduate student there, she became actively involved in key aerospace projects through the institute, which would further shape and mold her career.

The majority of her engineering career has been spent working at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where she began as an aerospace engineer in the Robotics group, but soon after, she transferred into the area of Guidance Navigation & Control. There, she worked on key satellite design projects which were invaluable in predetermining the dynamics and structural reactions of these spacecraft.

She would go on to spearhead, or play an important role in, other multi-million dollar space initiatives such as NASA's Tropical Rain Measuring Mission which helped observe the effects of weather cycles known as El Niño and La Niña in order to correlate their activity with crop productivity. Her other projects have included: the Wilkerson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (two of the "coolest" spacecraft for which she says she had the opportunity to design instrumentation), and the ICESat-2 Atlas (Ice, Cloud, & Land Elevation Satellite) - a $450 million laser altimeter instrument, which is expected to launch in 2016, that will provide measurements over the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica to quantify changes in ice-sheet mass that impact global sea level.

Aprille's noted outreach activities in science and engineering include: serving with the Goddard Space Flight Center's Speakers Bureau and the Women Group; serving as a mentor, instructor and advisor to students in aerospace, rocketry and mechanical engineering; and speaking at numerous science event locations, including the White House, the Women in Engineering Conference in South Africa; Oprah Winfrey's Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, and serving as a Nifty Fifty speaker for the USA Science & Engineering Festival since 2010.

Says Aprille: "I feel obligated to continue to help spur the interest of minorities and females in the math, science and engineering disciplines. Without diversity in all fields the United States will not remain technically competitive."

For her work and achievements, she has received numerous honors, including: Howard University's College of Engineering, Architecture, & Computer Science Alumni Excellence Award; NASA's Exceptional Achievement in Outreach Award, and the President's Medal from York College.

For more information, http://teachers.egfi-k12.org/aprille_ericsson-jackson/

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A Trailblazing Aerospace Engineer Gives Back By Inspiring Others In her lofty career as an aerospace engineer and instrument manager at NASA's prestigious Goddard Space Flight Center, Aprille Joy Ericsson has played a key role in designing spacecraft and instruments that contribute to our greater understanding of the Sun-Earth connection, space science and Earth itself.

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Nola Hylton, PhD, is a Professor in Residence in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Co-Director of the Breast Cancer Research Interest Group, and Director of the Breast Imaging Research Group at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Hylton received her BS in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1979, and she obtained her PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University, California in 1985. Dr. Hylton has been integrally involved in the development of magnetic resonance imaging for the detection, diagnosis, and staging of breast cancer. Dr. Hylton is an internationally known leader in the field of breast MRI for more than 20 years. Her search has addressed the clinical optimization and evaluation of breast MRI technology. Her current research program focuses on the development and clinical evaluation of MRI techniques for characterizing breast cancers and assessing their response to treatment. Her laboratory collaborates closely with a multi-disciplinary team of radiologists, surgeons, oncologists, and science researchers nation wide. This is to optimize MRI techniques for the clinical management of breast cancer patients. Dr. Hylton is among the first group of scholars named the Susan G. Komen for the Cure's Scientific Advisory Council. She served as co-leader for the DHHS office of Women's Health International Working Group where she identified and addressed barriers to clinical dissemination of breast MRI. She also served as the institutional Principal Investigator of the NCI International Breast MRI Consortium, which is the first large multi-center clinical trial evaluating breast MRI for breast cancer diagnosing and staging. Dr. Hylton has over 80 published research articles, and she has written 13 book chapters and over 130 abstracts.

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Nola Hylton, PhD, is a Professor in Residence in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Co-Director of the Breast Cancer Research Interest Group, and Director of the Breast Imaging Research Group at the University of California, San Francisco.

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Dr. Ashanti Johnson is the Assistant Vice Provost for Faculty Recruitment and an Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Texas at Arlington (UT Arlington), as well as the Executive Director of the Institute for Broadening Participation. Dr. Johnson received her B.S. (1993) in Marine Science from Texas A&M University-Galveston (TAMUG) and her Ph.D. (1999) in Oceanography from Texas A&M University (TAMU). Her areas of research specialization include: 1) environmental aquatic radiogeochemistry, 2) professional development of students and early career scientists, and 3) science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) diversity-focused initiatives. Dr. Johnson's aquatic radiogeochemistry research activities focus on the utilization of various biogeochemical indicators to interpret past events that have impacted the marine, estuarine and freshwater environments in the Arctic, as well as in coastal regions of Georgia, Florida and Puerto Rico. Her professional development and diversity-focused scholarly activities are designed to facilitate research and professional development experiences for students representing diverse socioeconomic, cultural, gender, racial and academic backgrounds. She is currently the director of the NASA One Stop Shopping Initiative (OSSI) Broker-Facilitator for Predominately White Institutions and Predominately Black Institutions, the NASA and NSF-funded Minorities Striving and Pursuing Higher Degrees of Success in Earth System Science (MS PHD'S) Professional Development Initiative and the NSF-funded Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) Bridge to the Doctorate (BD) Graduate Fellowship Program at the UT Arlington. She also serves as the PI of the NSF-funded Pathways to Ocean Science Project and Co-PI of the NSF-funded Pathways to Engineering Project. Prior to joining the University of Texas at Arlington faculty, at the University of South Florida she served as the PI and director of a NSF-funded LSAMP BD Graduate Fellowship Program and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Minority Ph.D. Program, co-director of an NSF-funded Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education (GK-12) Fellowship Program, and coordinator of an NSF Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Johnson has also served on numerous boards, including the National Academies Gulf Research Advisory Group, the NSF Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education American Geophysical Union Committee on Education and Human Resources and Subcommittee on Diversity, American Society of Limnology and Oceanography Education Committee, International Safe Water Conference Steering Committee, Digital Library for Earth System Education Annual Planning Committee, Savannah River Environmental Sciences Field Station Advisory Board, University of Maine's ADVANCE Rising Tide Center Advisory Board, COSEE: Ocean Systems Advisory Board, Maine Physical Sciences Partnership Advisory Board, MentorNet Geosciences Advisory Board and the Howard University Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Program External Advisory Board. Dr. Johnson has received numerous honors and awards and has been published in many scientific and education journals. In January 2010 she received a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) at the White House in recognition of her STEM professional development and diversity-related activities. On February 1, 2010 she was recognized by TheGrio.com, an NBC product, as one of 100 History Makers in The Making and she was profiled in the Black Enterprise Magazine March 2011 Issue's "Women In STEM" Feature Story.

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Dr. Ashanti Johnson is the Assistant Vice Provost for Faculty Recruitment and an Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Texas at Arlington (UT Arlington), as well as the Executive Director of the Institute for Broadening Participation. Dr. Johnson received her B.S.

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Value people, value learning, value kindness. These are the intentions that Tanya Moore, Ph.D. begins each day with. Moore currently serves as the Vice President of Mission Advancement for Goodwill Industries and is a founder of Infinite Possibilities Conference, a national conference designed to support women of color interested in mathematics and statistics. It was the support from her calculus teacher, Dr. Shah, during her first year at Spelman that gave her the confidence and support she needed to pursue mathematics as a career.

Moore always did well in math and had an interest in the subject, however, no one before Dr. Shah ever thought to introduce her to the career possibilities that mathematics holds. She went on to obtain her Ph.D. in Biostatistics and serve with the City of Berkeley in their public health division addressing disparities in health and focusing closely on reducing cardiovascular disease and diabetes in the African-American community. Her desire to address inequities and provide access to marginalized groups did not stop with the City of Berkeley.

Moore set her sights on creating a national conference that will educate and support women of color interested in mathematics or statistics. The Infinite Possibilities Conference (IPC) not only increased the mathematical skills of the attendees, it also highlighted the unique experiences that people of color will face in the field. Moore wanted to ensure the conference fostered community and with attendees ranging from high school students to doctors in the field, it opened the door to ample opportunity for networking and mentorship.

Moore carries the value of support and encouragement in the mathematics field throughout her work. She often remembers what Dr. Shah once told her "You may have to travel the road alone, but you don't have to be lonely". This solidifies that the community fostered through IPC is what women of color need to guide them through to success.

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In the News: Tanya Moore Develops a Community for Women of Color in Mathematics

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Jasmine Edison Value people, value learning, value kindness. These are the intentions that Tanya Moore, Ph.D. begins each day with. Moore currently serves as the Vice President of Mission Advancement for Goodwill Industries and is a founder of Infinite Possibilities Conference, a national conference designed to support women of color interested in mathematics and...

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Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH, recently joined the American Medical Association (AMA) in April 2019 as their inaugural chief health equity officer and group vice president. Her role is to embed health equity in all the work of the AMA and to launch a Health Equity Center.

Prior to this in 2014, Dr. Maybank became an associate commissioner, and later a deputy commissioner, and launched the Center for the Health Equity, a new division in the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene geared towards strengthening and amplifying the department's work in ending health inequities. Under her leadership and in a short amount of time, the department made great strides in transforming the culture and public health practice by embedding health equity in the department's work. This work has been recognized and adapted by other city agencies and has even captured the attention of the CDC and WHO.

Prior to this role, she was an assistant commissioner in the NYC Health Department over the Brooklyn District Public Health Office, a place-based approach, from April 2009-2014. Her bureau set a precedence DOHMH and created a template for community-driven neighborhood planning. Dr. Maybank also successfully launched the Office of Minority Health as its Founding Director in the Suffolk County Department of Health Services in NY from 2006-2009.

She also teaches medical and public health students on topics related to health inequities, public health leadership and management, physician advocacy and community organizing in health. Currently, Dr. Maybank serves as president of the Empire State Medical Association, the NYS affiliate of the National Medical Association. In 2012, she co-founded "We Are Doc McStuffins," a movement created by African American female physicians who were inspired by the Disney Junior character Doc McStuffins.

Dr. Maybank holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MD from Temple University School of Medicine and an MPH from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. She is pediatrician board certified in preventive medicine/public health.

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Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH, joined the American Medical Association (AMA) in April 2019 as their inaugural chief health equity officer and group vice president. Her role is to embed health equity in all the work of the AMA and to launch a Health Equity Center.

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Keisha Cook, Ph.D

Postdoctoral Researcher
Tulane University

Applied Mathematics
Computational Biology
Statistical Analysis
Bayesian Inference
Particle Tracking
Intracellular Dynamics

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Applied Mathematics Computational Biology Statistical Analysis Bayesian Inference Particle Tracking Intracellular Dynamics

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1 February 2020 814 views No Comment

Affiliation: Director of Division of Biometrics IV in the Office of Biostatistics, Office of Translational Sciences, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, FDA
Educational Background: PhD, Emory University; MS, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; BS, Norfolk State University

Dionne Price was born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, a city in the southeastern part of the state. She always enjoyed applied mathematics in school; therefore, when she was awarded a scholarship in the Dozoretz National Institute for Minorities in Applied Sciences at Norfolk State University, she leapt at the opportunity. As part of the program, students were strongly encouraged to obtain summer internships, so she spent a summer working in a biostatistics unit of the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Thus began her love of biostatistics. After completing her graduate studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Emory University, she went to work for the US Food and Drug Administration.

In Price's current role, she provides leadership to statisticians involved in the development and application of methodology used in the regulation of anti-infective, anti-viral, ophthalmology, rare diseases, urology, and reproductive drug products. Her research interests are in the design and analyses of clinical trials. Price has co-authored papers in such journals as Statistics in Medicine, Clinical Trials, and Statistics in Biopharmaceutical Research. She leads cross-cutting, collaborative efforts across FDA to advance and facilitate the use of complex innovative trial designs in pharmaceutical drug development. Price's effective communication, technical expertise, and keen understanding of regulatory policy have resulted in numerous invitations to represent the FDA on the latest statistical issues as a panel discussant, panel member, or the keynote or invited speaker at national and international conferences.

Price is an active member of the International Biometric Society (IBS), American Statistical Association, and FDA Statistical Association. She has served as chair of the ASA Biopharmaceutical Section, which boasts more than 2,000 members who share an interest in the application of statistics to the development and use of therapeutic drugs and devices in humans and animals. Price has also served on the Regional Advisory Board and Regional Committee of the Eastern North American Region of IBS. She was named an ASA Fellow in 2018 and has been elected as an ASA vice president.

As a plenary speaker at the 2019 Women in Statistics and Data Science conference, Price gave a talk titled, "Honor the Past, Celebrate the Present, and Envision the Future." She concluded by sharing that she occasionally scribbles poems, though she does not consider herself a poet, including the following:
The Journey
I am that woman and that woman is me,
Acquiring knowledge, I've learned is the key,
I stand on the foundation planted long ago,
I'm rooted in numbers and love how they flow
Now is the present and data abounds,
Quantitative inclinations will need to astound,
And as we look to tomorrow and days to come,
May we solve global challenges, and still have some fun.
I am that woman and that woman is me

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Dionne Price always enjoyed applied mathematics in school, but it was the chance to intern for the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke that sparked her love of biostatistics. Now at the FDA, she provides leadership to statisticians involved in the development and application of methodology used in the regulation of anti-infective, anti-viral, ophthalmology, rare diseases, urology, and reproductive drug products.