23 Badass Women In STEM They Should Teach You About In School

    Here is all the evidence you need that women in STEM are the greatest.

    Cassie Smyth
    by Cassie Smyth

    BuzzFeed Staff

    We asked the BuzzFeed Community to tell us about their favourite women in STEM. This is what they said:

    1. Rosalind Franklin

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    I didn't learn about her until college and I think it's sad since I knew who discovered the structure of DNA in middle school. She is literally the reason we know what the structure of DNA looks like. Watson and Crick basically stole her x-rays for the structure and used it so they could figure it out first. She also never received the Noble Prize for her pictures because she died before the ceremony and also because she was a woman. She still hasn't received it. If it weren't for Rosalind, biology, genetics, and many other branches of science wouldn't be where they are now. Girl needs the credit and recognition that has been long overdue for her.

    —funkysammie

    2. Sophie Germain

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    She was a badass French mathematician around 1800. She had to publish work under a male pseudonym because the 1800s sucked. She went on to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences but couldn’t even attend the ceremony until 7 years later when Fourier, fellow mathematician and secretary of the Academy, gave her tickets to attend. She published work in elasticity and, my favourite, number theory.

    —shelbiedoesthings

    3. Marian Diamond

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    Female Anatomist who was a heavy influence in neuroscience

    —jessieg40bd2747e

    4. Brenda Milner

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    Basically the founder of neuropsychology and still actively doing science at 100 years old!

    —tinkabay

    5. Ada Lovelace

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace was programming computers before computers were even a thing! Back in the mid-1800s, she took Charles Babbage's ideas for a calculating machine, the "Analytical Engine", and wrote hypothetical programs on it based on his writings and drawings alone. She is widely considered to be the first programmer and is called the mother of computer science. Oh, and she was a mathematician and also dabbled in neurology and did all this before she died at age 36!

    —RuddigorePenzance

    6. Dr. Fe Del Mundo

    en.wikipedia.org / creative commons

    She became the first Asian and the first woman to attend Harvard medical school almost by accident. The president of the Philippines offered her a full ride scholarship in the US and she chose Harvard. She got in 9 years before Harvard admitted accept female students.

    With her education, she advocated for children’s health. She conducted research on dengue, polio and measles, advocated for public health in rural communities, advocated for family planning, and invented an incubator made out of bamboo for rural communities.

    —marthareubendt

    7. Barbara McClintock

    en.wikipedia.org

    She was honestly one of the most brilliant minds in the field of genetics (and in general if you ask me). She accurately predicted the mechanism behind transposons (“jumping genes”) without any evidence. She simply looked at the colours in maize kernels and said, “I know exactly what’s going on here.” All of her contemporaries laughed at her and called her hypotheses imaginative and preposterous. Once we had the technology to study her hypotheses, she was proven right. What sounded like absolutely, made-up, magic to everyone but her was absolutely right. After everyone’s mouths were no longer gaping open, she was awarded a Nobel Prize.

    —s484024fc1

    8. Frances Kathleen Oldham Kelsey

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    She worked for the FDA and refused to authorize Thalidomide in the US, preventing potentially widespread birth defects in the US.

    —ladyinredpen

    9. Hedy Lamarr

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    The woman was incredible. She fled her country and her abusive husband to pursue an acting career by day, but by night, she was a GENIUS engineer. She was almost entirely self-taught, inventing insanely cool, random things in her trailer in between film takes. In 1941, she and her pianist friend patented a frequency-hopper that ensured Allied radio-controlled torpedoes couldn’t be detected by the Nazis. That technology paved the way for wi-fi, Bluetooth, and GPS - and she never profited from it. Hedy Lamarr deserves way more recognition than she ever received in her lifetime.

    —madelineb4381cfa55

    10. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha's research showed how children were exposed to dangerous levels of lead in Flint, Michigan.

    She has helped many Flint residents and even wrote a book about it. Please do more research on her because without her, the Flint water crisis could have gone on for much longer.

    —lydeang

    11. Sangeeta Bhatia

    youtube.com

    An MIT doctor, bioengineer, and entrepreneur whose lab found a urine test for cancer and who’s created human mini livers have changed the way drugs are tested. She’s an incredible role model for women in STEM, not only for to her scientific contributions, but for the elegant way in which she balances her professional and personal roles.

    —lenag46c8f14a2

    12. Peggy Whitson

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative commons

    American biochemistry researcher, NASA astronaut, and former NASA Chief Astronaut. She holds a bunch of records including most days in space for an American astronaut and the most for a woman of any nationality. She also was the first woman to command the International Space Station twice. She’s amazing!

    —thestemstronaut

    13. Dr. Ann McKee

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    She's a neuropathologist and professor at the BU School of Medicine. She's a leading researcher on CTE and directs several brain banks that make significant contributions to the study of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. McKee is a crusader who frequently receives backlash for her research (which has found CTE in 99% of the brains donated by former NFL players for research) because of the attention it draws to the dangers of collision sports like football and hockey. Her work has encouraged many of the player safety rules in the NFL and eventually to the NFL donating $1 million to CTE research.

    —eagles52

    14. Marie Tharp

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    She mapped the entire ocean floor using “soundings” which are radar pings that bounce back off the ocean floor from boats above. She and Bruce Heezen worked together on the project together.

    —julesnewbold

    15. Mary Cover Jones

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    Behaviorist psychologist Mary Cover Jones! She was the “Mother of Behaviorism” and she is accredited with discovering/developing desensitisation. Desensitisation is essentially the reversal of fears. She basically discovered how fears can be psychologically cured.

    —cammace

    16. Dr. Teresa Woodruff

    woodrufflab.org

    Dr. Teresa Woodruff at Northwestern University! Her laboratory helped to discover that eggs release sparks of zinc at the moment of fertilisation. She heads the Oncofertility Consortium (helping female cancer patients explore there reproductive options prior to treatment), she has been honoured by President Obama in the Oval Office, and was named by Time Magazine one of its most influential people in 2013. And coolest of all, is the EVATAR system (seriously check it out). She's a rockstar, and the nicest lady!

    —travisk4f4edb82b

    17. Henrietta Swan Leavitt

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    She worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a “computer” with several other women. She discovered the period-luminosity effect of Cepheid stars, which other astronomers later used to determine where in the universe we are and to confirm that the universe is expanding. She was paid next to nothing, grew increasingly deaf as she got older, and often had to work on this discovery, later named Leavitt’s Law, on her own time. Lauren Gunderson incredible play about her life at Harvard called Silent Sky, which I would absolutely recommend!

    —alexe4ff5a27c4

    18. Grace Hopper

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computers. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She's won numerous awards both military and civilian during her lifetime, and there is a US Navy Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer named after her.

    —danibread

    19. Claire Voisin

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    Claire Voisin is a mathematician who works in the field of algebraic geometry. She has a successful career, having received many awards, while being a mother of five.

    —iuliaplesca

    20. Cecilia Payne

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    She was an astronomer who discovered what stars (and the sun) are made of. Her findings were denied by male scientists due to her gender, but were later found to be true. She was intelligent, persistent, an out of the box thinker and is completely underrated! She deserves so much more credit!!

    —hamiltonandlaurens

    21. Dr. Kate Biberdorf

    22. Doris Taylor

    en.wikipedia.org / Creative Commons

    She has been at the forefront of heart regeneration for years and was the one of the first people to remove cells from a donor heart and repopulate the tissue with cells from the recipient to avoid immune issues from a heart transplant.

    —creepingone

    23. And all of the inspiring women in the field.

    PBS Kids

    Not sure if this counts but I had an amazing math teacher in high school who was one of my favourites. She wasn’t a researcher or ever had any break through theories or anything, but she was passionate and one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. There were these little folding puzzles she would give me to solve and she would find and print off more challenging ones each time I finished. She’s part of the reason I am majoring in math in college right now.

    —azariaa3

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