Elizabeth Blackburn was born in Hobart in 1948 to parents who were both family physicians. Her family moved to Melbourne when she was sixteen where she attended University High School, gaining very high marks in the end-of-year exams. Elizabeth went on [...]
Dian Fossey was born in San Francisco in 1932 and trained as an occupational therapist. In 1963 she took a brief trip to Africa, where she met the anthropologist Louis Leakey and had her first glimpse of mountain gorillas. Leakey persuaded [...]
Perhaps the finest nature writer of the Twentieth Century, Rachel Carson is remembered more today as the woman who challenged the notion that humans could obtain mastery over nature by chemicals, bombs and space travel than for her studies of ocean life. [...]
Born in 1962, Californian Diane Bryant had good grades in school, but no one in her family had gone to college before and her family expected her to become a hairdresser. But she had dreams of going to college, enrolling in [...]
Born in Canada in 1914, pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey's bold stance against inadequate drug testing saved countless newborns in the US from the perils of thalidomide. Frances Oldham was born in British Colombia, Canada in 1914. She graduated from McGill University with [...]
Called the "queen of code" and "mother of computing", Grace Hopper was one of the world’s first computer programmers. Hopper attained a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. When she attempted to [...]
Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered radio pulsars in 1967 – considered one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century. Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast in 1943. Her father was an architect who had helped design the Armagh Planetarium, and [...]
British born Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates) as literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work. Cecilia won a scholarship to Cambridge [...]
In 1961, after Yuri Gagarin had beaten the Americans to become the first man in space, the Soviets decided to also go for the accolade of first woman in space. Tereshkova was selected out of 400 applicants, largely due to her [...]
As a young child, Birutė's head was filled with visions of far off forests and exotic creatures. The first book she borrowed from the library was a tale about a mischievous little monkey named Curious George. When she grew older, she [...]
Marie Skłodowska Curie was born on 7 November in 1867 in Poland (later naturalised French). The physicist and chemist pioneered the research on radioactivity together with her husband Pierre Curie. Her achievements included a theory of radioactivity (a term that she coined), techniques [...]
Jill Bolte Taylor: An extraordinary journey One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor's brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realised she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one [...]
Mary Somerville: Pioneer Scientist Mary Fairfax Somerville was born on 27 December 1780, the daughter of Vice-Admiral Sir William George Fairfax (scion of a distinguished family of Fairfaxes), and was related to several prominent Scottish houses through her mother. She was informally taught [...]
