Ada Lovelace Day: Profiles

Marie Tharp, Geologist and Oceanographic Cartographer

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:31:31 GMT

Marie Tharp

Marie Tharp was an American geologist and oceanic cartographer who co-created the first detailed map of the Atlantic Ocean floor and, in the process, discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, providing vital proof of the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift.

After an unsatisfying stint as a junior geologist for Standard Oil, in 1948 Tharp found a job at the Lamont Geological Observatory (now the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory). She initially worked on using photographic evidence to locate World War II aircraft that had ditched at sea, which involved plotting the sea floor.

That work evolved into an ocean floor mapping project. Her colleague, Bruce Heezen, collected sonar soundings data from trips on research ships, and Tharp analysed it back at base, as she was not allowed onboard. This collaboration was the first systematic attempt to map the ocean floor, which at the time was assumed to be flat and uninteresting.

Tharp plotted out the data by hand to create six east-west profiles and discovered not just a long ridge running down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but an enormous rift valley in the middle of the ridge itself.

The idea of continental drift was controversial at the time, but a rift valley would be evidence that the oceanic crust was pulling apart, with new crust being erupted along the undersea mountain range. Tharp’s conclusions were dismissed by Heezen as “girl talk”.

Further evidence that Tharp was correct came from a map of earthquake epicentres which, when laid over her map, matched perfectly with the central rift valley. In 1957, Heezen published Tharp’s work and took credit for it – her name appears nowhere on that paper, nor on any of the other papers published by him or others between 1959 and 1963.

Tharp continued to map ocean floors, and found similar mid-ocean ridges in the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. She had discovered a global oceanic rift system.

In 1978, Tharp (and Heezen, posthumously) were awarded the Hubbard Medal, the National Geographic Society’s highest honour. She was also awarded the Mary Sears Woman Pioneer in Oceanography Award by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1998, and won the Lamont-Doherty Heritage Award by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Maria Sibylla Merian, Naturalist and Scientific Illustrator

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:30:56 GMT

Maria Sibylla Merian

Maria Sibylla Merian was a naturalist and scientific illustrator, one of the first researchers to systematically observe insects and the first person to document the process of metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly or moth. She also discovered that caterpillars ate only specific plants, and that the butterfly would therefore lay eggs near these plants. She observed the way that some larvae shed their skins, detailed how larvae spun their cocoons, and made many other observations that had not been recorded before.

Born in 1647 in Germany, Merian made major contributions to entomology and was one of the first ecologists. Her observations were very detailed, for example, she identified the differences between male and female adult insects and examined their full life-cycle. In one notable illustration, she shows all the steps of the silkworm moth life-cycle.

In 1679, a year after the birth of her second daughter, Merian published Der Raupen wunderbarer Verwandlung (The Wondrous Transformation of Caterpillars), the result of almost two decades of observations. Merian illustrated her book about caterpillars herself, composing complex, lifelike scenes, where several insects interact with each other.

In 1699, Merian travelled with her youngest daughter to Suriname in South America and spent two years collecting specimens. Expeditions for scientists at that time were quite uncommon, and women especially did not travel to a different continent on their own. The outcome from her research justified the trip: her seminal work Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, (Metamorphosis of Surinamese Insects), which describes the plant and animal life of Suriname.

Dr Jeanne Lee Crews, Aerospace Engineer

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:30:23 GMT

Dr Jeanne Lee Crews

Dr Jeanne Lee Crews is a NASA aerospace engineer who designed a flexible multi-shock shield to protect spacecraft from debris, and which is still in use on the International Space Station.

Lee Crews joined NASA in 1964, one of the first female engineers to join the agency. She initially worked on the Apollo missions, identifying landmarks that the astronauts could use to navigate by, if primary systems failed. During this project, she became one of the first women to go on a zero-G flight.

She later began the hyper-velocity laboratory, where she worked on developing advanced protection for spacecraft and satellites. It was, by then, already clear that collisions with even very small pieces of space debris, travelling at orbital speeds, can cause severe damage. Lee Crews built a small hydrogen fuelled gun to begin testing materials to see how well they withstood high-velocity impacts. She rapidly realised that the aluminium usually used to build spacecraft was vulnerable to debris collisions so, to achieve better protection, she developed a shield comprising multiple layers of ceramic fabric, open-cell foam and other materials.

More recently, Lee Crews has been working on a method to collect orbital debris. Her design calls for a very large balloon, between 1km and 10km in diameter, made of ceramic fabric, that will “shock whatever has struck the craft so much that it is vaporised. If you have four or five sheets, one behind the other, you shock it repeatedly and raise energy levels so much you get more vaporisation and it gets smaller and smaller.” Once full, the balloon would be returned to Earth.

Lee Crews has received many awards, including the Women in Aerospace Lifetime Achievement Award, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, and the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal.

Prof Gerty Cori, Biochemist

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:50:29 GMT

Professor Gerty Cori

Gerty Theresa Cori was a biochemist who in 1941 became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for her co-discovery of the glucose-lactate metabolic pathway, work she carried out with her husband, Carl.

Cori was born in Prague in 1896, now in the Czech Republic but then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1922, due to the increasing antisemitism in Europe, she and her husband fled to the USA.

In 1929, the pair described how lactate travels from the muscles, is processed by the liver into glucose, and transported back to the muscles to become lactate again, a metabolic pathway now known as the Cori Cycle. It is an important biological process that enables the human body to store energy (although it can also lead to muscle cramps!).

Cori made several other groundbreaking contributions to medical science, such as identifying glucose 1-phosphate (also known as the Cori ester) which enables the breakdown of glycogen, after studying compounds in frog muscles. Her work led to improved treatments for diabetes, and greater understanding of glycogen storage disease, for which she identified four enzymatic defects. During this work she became the first person to show that a defect in an enzyme can cause genetic disease in humans.

Despite her enormous contributions to the field, Cori was unable to get the same recognition as her husband, or to develop a similar career, despite the fact that they collaborated on most of their research. She was frequently paid a fraction of what her husband earnt, and was warned that she was damaging his career. While it took her 13 years longer than her husband, she eventually received the title of professor a matter of months before she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Aside from her Nobel Prize win, she continued to receive other awards and recognition, such as becoming a Fellow of the American Arts and Sciences in 1953, and being appointed to the board of the National Science Foundation by President Harry S Truman in 1950.

Dr Rose Dieng-Kuntz, Computer Scientist

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 10:30:33 GMT

Dr Rose Dieng-Kuntz

Rose Dieng-Kuntz was a computer scientist who studied artificial intelligence and the sharing of information via the World Wide Web. She was also one of the first people to work on the semantic web, beginning her work on this subject just a few years after the web itself was launched and before its use became widespread.

The semantic web was a huge step forward for the web, and Dieng-Kuntz described it as “a web of knowledge linking individuals, organisations, countries and continents”. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) states that “The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.”

She said, “The research we are aiming for seeks to improve cooperation between business and the community by building ‘knowledge webs’, a goal that is in phase with Europe’s target of evolving from an ‘information society’ to a ‘knowledge society’.”

Dieng-Kuntz further worked on combining the semantic web with intelligent agents, a concept developed from artificial intelligence where machines are able to talk to other machines, allowing the semantic web to be automated.

Born in Senegal, Dieng-Kuntz worked for the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) on Artificial Intelligence from 1985 until her death in 2008. She was the first African woman to be awarded a diploma at the renowned École Polytechnique in Paris, France, and in 2005, she won the Irène Joliot-Curie prize, awarded annually to outstanding women scientists by the French Research Ministry and the EADS Group.

Dr Marjorie Lee Browne, Mathematician and Educator

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 10:30:39 GMT

Dr Marjorie Lee Browne

Marjorie Lee Browne was the third African-American woman to get a PhD in mathematics, and opened one of the first computer centres at an historically Black university.

Browne studied mathematics at Howard University and graduated cum laude in 1935. She then applied for the graduate program at the University of Michigan for mathematics. She could only attend Michigan during the summer because she was working the rest of the year at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas.

She eventually received a teaching fellowship at Michigan University, meaning she could attend full-time. She completed her dissertation, Studies of One Parameter Subgroups of Certain Topological and Matrix Groups, and completed her doctorate in 1949. After Euphemia Haynes in 1943, and together with Evelyn Boyd Granville, she was one of the first three African-American women to earn a doctorate in mathematics in the US.

She went on to join the faculty of mathematics at North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University, NCCU), and for 25 years she was the only person in the department to have a doctorate. She was department Chair from 1951 until 1970, and retired in 1979.

Browne recognised the importance of computers, and in 1960 she wrote a grant proposal to IBM, winning $60,000 to set up an electronic digital computer centre at NCCU, one of the first at a minority college.

She ran summer institutes to help secondary school teachers develop their own mathematics education, and provided financial support to gifted students. She was the first recipient of the WW Rankin Memorial Award for Excellence in Mathematics Education, presented by the North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The University of Michigan runs the Marjorie Lee Brown Scholars program in her honour.

Dr Marian Croak, Engineer

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 10:30:44 GMT

Dr Marian Croak

Dr Marian Croak is the developer of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and the technology behind “text to donate”. She holds over two hundred patents, of which 125 relate to VOIP.

In the early days of the internet, Croak realised just how revolutionary it would be. She also realised that it was inefficient for her employers, AT&T, to run both a traditional phone network alongside a new digital network for the internet when the internet could be used for both. She and her team experimented with “packetizing” voice, converting the sound into a digital signal that could be carried over the internet.

Croak struggled to convince colleagues that this was an important step forward, as many of them considered the internet to be a fad that would soon fall out of fashion. But she was eventually successful and now VOIP is used on a daily basis by millions to conduct phone calls over the internet.

The use of SMS messages as a way to donate to crisis appeals, or “text to donate”, was also her idea. In 2010, this invention helped to raise $32 million for survivors of the earthquake in Haiti. The “text to donate” technology is also used as “text your vote” for American TV shows such as American Idol.

Croak started her professional career in 1982, working in data services at Bell Laboratories, which was acquired by AT&T in 1984. She joined Google in 2014 and today she is the vice president of engineering for access strategy and emerging markets, where she leads several projects to improve internet technology all over the world.

She has received several awards and serves as a board member for many non-profit organisations. It was announced in 2021 that, together with ophthalmologist Patricia Bath, she will become one of the first two black women to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

You can follow her work here:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marian-croak-926361bb

Klára Dán von Neumann, Computer Scientist

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 10:30:43 GMT

Klára Dán von Neumann

An early computer programmer, Klára Dán von Neumann led the team that produced the first computer-generated 12-hour and 24-hour retrospective weather forecasts. Despite having had little mathematical education, she became one of the primary programmers for the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) for this project.

In the late 1940s, Dán von Neumann worked with her husband, John von Neumann, on turning the ENIAC into one of the first stored-program computers, able to run programs that had been stored in binary code on a memory device. Until then programs had to be entered and re-entered by hand.

The ENIAC then became the focus of The Meteorology Project, which aimed to use the computer to generate weather forecasts. Using data from past storms, they produced two 12-hour and 24-hour retrospective forecasts. Not only was that the first time a weather forecast had been produced by computer, it was also the first time a computer had been used to conduct a physics experiment.

Dán von Neumann was instrumental to the project, checking the final code for the experiment, training programmers, hand-punching and managing the 100,000 punch-cards that were used for storing the program, and ensuring that no data was lost. This was difficult and highly technical work.

Born in Hungary in 1911, Klára won the national figure skating championship aged just 14. She married John von Neumann in 1938, and the couple moved to the US because of the rising antisemitism in Europe.

Hertha Ayrton, Physicist, Inventor and Suffragette

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 10:30:11 GMT

Hertha Ayrton

Born in 1854, Hertha Ayrton’s first accomplishment was to invent and patent a line-divider. Built out of several parallelograms, it allows users to divide a line into any number of equal parts and to enlarge or reduce a figure.

Her work on electric arcs started in 1893. Widely used in street lighting, electric arcs flickered and hissed, which caused problems. Ayrton discovered that the arc’s hiss was due to oxygen coming into contact with the carbon rods used to create the arc, and that when oxygen was excluded the arc remained steady. This allowed her to develop the Ayrton equation, which describes the linear relationship between arc length, pressure and potential difference.

Ayrton became the first woman to present her own paper, The Hissing of the Electric Arc, in front of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), and soon became the first woman to be elected to the IEE. The Royal Society rejected her petition to present her paper, The Mechanism of the Electric Arc, which was read by a man in her stead. They also rejected John Perry’s proposal that she become a Fellow.

Ayton went on to study the formation of ripples in sand and waves in water, and recognised that the formation of ripples would affect propellers and aircraft. She became the first woman to read a paper, The Origin and Growth of Ripple Marks, at the Royal Society in 1904, and was the first woman to be awarded the Hughes Medal for her work on ripples and the electric arc in 1906.

During World War I, she used her work on waves to design the ‘Ayrton anti-gas fans’ that were, eventually, used to remove mustard gas and other chemical weapons from the trenches, dug-outs and shell holes, and mine craters.

Ángela Ruiz Robles, Writer and Inventor

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 09:30:35 GMT

Ángela Ruiz Robles

Ángela Ruiz Robles invented and, in 1948, patented the la Enciclopedia Mecánica, or Mechanical Encyclopaedia, which is considered to be an early version of an ebook. She couldn’t build a prototype until 1962; it is now exhibited in the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Coruña, Spain.

The mechanical book displayed content on three scroll-like reels that could be wound forwards or backwards across a central ‘page’. The reels were interchangeable, so content was customisable. The book came with a built-in light to facilitate reading in the dark, and it also supported sounds. The size of an ordinary book, it was enclosed by two box-like covers.

Ruiz Robles developed the Mechanical Encyclopaedia for her students so that they would not have to carry heavy books around. She believed her device would make learning more attractive by allowing her to adapt the learning materials to the specific needs of the individual student. The content reels could be produced in any language, and about any subject at any level, and teachers could produce their own content for it.

Ultimately, despite several trips to Madrid to try to find backing, she was unable to fund production or find a production partner.

In 1947, she received the Cross of Alfonso X the Wise for her innovations in education and social work, and in 1952 she was awarded a Gold Medal at an exhibition for Spanish inventors.

Olga González-Sanabria, Chemical Engineer

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 09:30:58 GMT

Olga González-Sanabria

Olga González-Sanabria is a Puerto Rican chemical engineer who developed the long cycle-life nickel-hydrogen batteries that have been used on the International Space Station, the Hubble telescope and Mars Odyssey.

González-Sanabria worked as the Director of Engineering at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, responsible for engineering design and development, fabrication, systems engineering and integration, and systems analysis.

Originally from Patillas, Puerto Rico, she started her academic career at the University of Puerto Rico. She earned her master’s degree in chemical engineering at the University of Toledo in Ohio.

Over the three decades that she worked for NASA she earned several awards, the most notable being the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal and the NASA Exceptional Service Medal. In 2021 she was inducted into the NASA Glenn Research Center Hall of Fame for her lifetime achievements, and was the highest-ranking Hispanic at NASA Glenn. Now retired from NASA after 32 years service, she currently works as a consultant.

You can follow her work here:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/olga-gonzalez-sanabria-7100371a

Prof Omowunmi Sadik, Chemist and Inventor

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 09:31:01 GMT

Prof Omowunmi Sadik

Prof Omowunmi “Wunmi” Sadik is a Nigerian chemist and inventor who has developed an “electronic nose” – microelectrode biosensors that can detect trace amounts of organic materials and is used for detecting drugs and explosives. She has also developed a biosensor that can identify the presence of the HIV virus in a matter of minutes rather than the three-to-four days it takes with the ELISHA tests.

Sadik has developed methods for removing toxins such as organochlorine compounds from the environment, and is investigating ways to reclaim metal ions from industrial and environmental waste. Using microbial enzymes, she increased the conversion of highly toxic chromium (VI) to non-toxic chromium (III) from 40% to 98%.

Other research includes examining the whole lifetime impact of nanoparticles used commercially in products such as nano silver-impregnated socks. Silver nanoparticles are believed to have anti-microbial properties, but the consequences of exposure to these particles is poorly understood. Sadik is using conducting polymer membranes to trap or filter silver and other nanoparticles to help study how they behave in the environment and the human body.

Sadik co-founded and is currently president of the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organisation, a non-profit organisation which promotes the development and advancement of sustainable nanotechnology in all parts of the world. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2010 and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2012.

You can follow her work here:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/omowunmi-wunmi-sadik-1a8b009

Prof Sylvia Ratnasamy, Computer Scientist

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 09:30:29 GMT

Professor Sylvia Ratnasamy

Professor Sylvia Ratnasamy is a computer scientist specialising in networking who invented the distributed hash table, a way of efficiently storing data without requiring a central registry.

In her 2001 paper, “A Scalable, Content-Addressable Network”, Ratnasamy became the first person to define a scalable design for distributed hash tables (DHT), an essential element in large-scale distributed and peer-to-peer computing systems. Her paper is currently one of the most cited in the recent history of computer science.

DHTs optimise data storage across several locations or even geographies by splitting data into objects, and they are now used in many distributed datacenters and by cloud service providers. DHTs enables large enterprises, including big tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook, to efficiently manage and distribute data in storage systems across the globe, while making it rapidly accessible wherever necessary. Without DHTs, today’s cloud services, file sharing services and social networks would be much more complex.

Ratnasamy’s later work improved scalability for peer-to-peer applications such as file-sharing and developed more effective connection topologies for DHTs. She also introduced OpenDHT, a public DHT service that makes it possible for any organisation to easily and quickly build their own distributed systems.

Ratnasamy is a professor at Berkeley University, where her research is in operating systems & networking. She was named one of IEEE’s N² Women: Star in Computer Networking and Communications in 2019, and was given ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2014.

You can follow her work here:

Website: eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/ratnasamy.html

Prof Dame Pratibha Gai, Materials Chemist and Electron Microscopist

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 09:30:32 GMT

Professor Dame Pratibha Gai

Professor Dame Pratibha Gai co-invented the atomic resolution environmental transmission electron microscope (ETEM), which allows scientists to visualise and analyse gas-catalyst reactions at an atomic scale, leading to a better understanding of how catalysts work.

Over two decades, Gai and her team redesigned a standard electron microscope. They drilled a hole through the imaging lens so that gas could be pumped into the electron microscope chamber, turning it into a chemical reaction vessel that could be used at high temperatures and pressures.

Using the ETEM, Gai became the first person to see “columns of atoms” interacting in real time during a reaction. Before the ETEM, such high resolution microscopy could only be done before or after a chemical reaction had taken place – it wasn’t possible to watch the reaction happening.

"I could see how a substrate interacted with a noble metal nanoparticle catalyst and watch the changing structure at atomic level," she told Wiley Analytical Science Magazine. "It was thrilling."

The newest version of the microscope is the environmental scanning transmission electron microscope (ESTEM), which allows scientists to see individual atoms undergoing chemical reactions.

Gai uses the ESTEM to more fully understand chemical reactions and to develop catalysts for use in fields such as medicine and sustainable materials. She has developed antibiotic nanoparticles to control infection in medical implants, and an environmentally responsible nanocoating process for strong polymers and coatings.

Gai became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire For services to Chemical Sciences and Technology in 2018, and a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards Laureate for Europe in 2013. She’s also an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society, and the Royal Microscopical Society.

Prof Vivian Wing-Wah Yam, 任詠華, Chemist

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 09:31:08 GMT

Professor Vivian Wing-Wah Yam, 任詠華

Professor Vivian Wing-Wah Yam is a chemist whose work on brighter and more efficient organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) has led to the development of more efficient displays for mobile phones and laptops. These OLEDs can be deposited on a variety of materials, including clear plastic and glass, leading to better car headlights and larger flat screen TVs.

Yam’s aim is to reduce the amount of energy used in lighting by developing much more efficient lights and displays. Her research focuses on creating new photoactive materials by combining metal atoms with organic molecules that can absorb or emit light at a range of wavelengths and efficiencies.

Photoactive materials with tunable absorption and emission colours and other properties may lead to the development of materials that can more efficiently store solar energy, improving photovoltaics and solar fuels, and improving OLED displays and white organic light-emitting diodes (WOLEDs) for solid state lighting.

Other uses for these photoactive materials include harvesting sunlight for the photocatalysis of water to produce hydrogen gas, sensing biological molecules such as the amyloids found in Alzheimer’s disease, or even developing new binary optical memory for digital data storage.

In 2001, she became the youngest member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in 2011 she became a L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science laureate. This year, she was a recipient of the 2022 American Chemical Society (ACS) National Award, The Josef Michl ACS Award in Photochemistry.

She is currently working on developing OLEDs with cheaper, more abundant metals such as nickel. She’s also investigating organic resistive memory which relies on molecules that don’t conduct electricity at low voltages, but can conduct at high voltages thus creating a binary resistive memory.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @VivianYam1
Website: web.hku.hk/~wwyam/yam/homepage/

Raye Montague, Naval Engineer

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 09:30:15 GMT

Raye Montague

Raye Montague was an American engineer who revolutionised naval ship design, proving that computer aided design could produce first drafts of ship specifications in hours rather than years.

Although Montague had wanted to become an engineer from childhood, her home university, the University of Arkansas, did not accept black students on their engineering program. Instead, she completed a degree in business and moved to Washington, DC, starting her career in the US Navy as a typist. She attended night school to learn computer programming and engineering.

Montague’s desk at the Naval Ship Engineering Center was positioned next to the UNIVAC I computer, and she learnt how to program it through observation. When the UNIVAC I programmer was off sick one day, she stepped in to run the computer. She persuaded her boss to promote her to computer systems analyst, but was forced to work the night shift.

The Navy had spent six years unsuccessfully trying to design ships using computers and in 1971, this task was given to Montague. She took the contractors’ program, tore it down, analysed and revised it so that it met her requirements, and then rebuilt it to run on the Navy’s computer. This meant more night shifts.

She was then asked to design an actual ship, an Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate, a task that usually took two years. She brought her team together on a Saturday morning and set the computer running. At midnight she went home for a rest, only to be called back to the office. The program had finished the design in 18 hours and 26 minutes. For this feat, Montague was awarded the Navy’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1972.

She was the first woman to become program manager of the Navy's Information Systems Improvement Program, with the civilian equivalent rank of naval captain. The Navy started using her system to design all of its ships and submarines. She later worked on ships such as the Seawolf-class submarine and the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Prof Priyamvada Natarajan, Astrophysicist

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 09:30:34 GMT

Professor Priyamvada Natarajan

Professor Priyamvada Natarajan is a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University who has worked in a variety of fields such as gravitational lensing, galaxy formation and supermassive black holes. She developed a way to map dark matter using gravitational lensing, or the bending of light around galaxies. Her techniques for developing dark matter maps are now standard in cosmology.

She loved astronomy from a young age, eventually doing computations for the Nehru Planetarium, India, after she impressed the director with a program she had written to plot sky maps.

Natarajan got her PhD in 1998 from University of Cambridge, and was elected to a fellowship at Trinity College, the first woman in astrophysics to achieve this. During her graduate research, she wrote a paper predicting that supermassive black holes would create a “black hole wind”, blowing stellar material thousands of light years away. This gas would then accrete and form stars, resulting in galaxies and globular clusters that were short of dark matter. This theoretical prediction was later proven correct by a team of researchers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Virginia, in 2019.

She became a professor at Yale University, where she explored the formation of bright quasars that are powered by huge black holes, but which were formed early in the history of the universe, at the same time that stars were beginning to form. She suggested a process to explain how these black holes may have formed, without an accretion of stellar material, via the “direct-collapse” of gas disks. This process is now considered to be one of the main ways in which black holes form.

In 2009, Natarajan became a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and won India’s “Face of the Future” award. She received an India Empire NRI award for Achievement in the Sciences in 2011, and more recently, the University of Delhi gave her a lifetime honorary professorship. She is also active in supporting women in STEM, acting as Chairman for Yale’s Women Faculty Forum.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @sheerpriya
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/priya-natarajan-66b0215
Website: campuspress.yale.edu/priya/

Prof Sau Lan Wu, 吳秀蘭, Particle Physicist

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 09:30:21 GMT

Professor Sau Lan Wu, 吳秀蘭

Born in Hong Kong, Professor Sau Lan Wu is a Chinese American particle physicist who was a member of the teams that discovered the J/psi particle, the gluon and evidence that points to the existence of the Higgs boson.

In 1974, Wu was part of an MIT team working with the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Using the high-intensity proton beams to bombard a target, they discovered a strong peak at 3.1 billion electron volts, indicating that they had found a new particle which decayed into electron-positron pairs. This was the J/psi particle, and it provided experimental evidence of the Charm quark. The discovery of the Charm quark was so momentous that it was called the November Revolution and led to the establishment of the Standard Model of particle physics.

In the late 70s, Wu’s mathematical analysis of three ‘jets’ of energy produced by particle collisions led to the discovery of the gluon, a particle which ‘glues’ quarks together to form protons and neutrons. She was a co-recipient of the 1995 European Physical Society High Energy and Particle Physics Prize for this discovery.

Wu spent over thirty years in search of the Higgs boson. She was a group leader at ATLAS, one of two groups working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the other was CMS), and although they observed a number of candidates, none of their results were statistically significant.

On 4 July 2012, following experiments by both ATLAS and CMS, CERN announced the discovery of a boson with the same characteristics as those predicted for the Higgs boson by the Standard Model. Wu’s team had worked on understanding the decay of the Higgs boson into two gamma rays or into four leptons, and this work was crucial to the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She continues to work on the Higgs boson, and is also now searching for the particles that make up dark matter.

Tu Youyou, 屠呦呦, Pharmaceutical Chemist

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 15 May 2025 09:30:21 GMT

Tu Youyou, 屠呦呦

Tu Youyou is a Chinese phytochemist and pharmaceutical chemist who discovered the antimalarial drugs artemisinin in 1972 and dihydroartemisinin in 1973. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015, the first Chinese citizen to receive a Nobel in that category and the first Chinese woman to receive a Nobel in any category.

In 1969, Tu was recruited to lead Project 523, a research group tasked with finding a treatment for malaria. She began by talking to practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine and compiling information about 640 folk remedies in a book, A Collection of Single Practical Prescriptions for Anti-Malaria. She and her team then began testing, screening over 2,000 recipes and making 380 herbal extracts from around 200 herbs.

One herb, sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) was often prescribed for "intermittent fevers", a common symptom of malaria. Instructions for its preparation could be found in a 1,600-year-old text, in a recipe titled, Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One's Sleeve. Initial tests seemed to show that the sweet wormwood was ineffective, but after reading The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments, a book about traditional Chinese herbal medicine written in 340 by Ge Hong, Tu realised that a low-temperature extraction method was needed because the usual boiling water method destroyed the active compounds.

In 1972, Tu isolated the active compound, qinghaosu (青蒿素), or artemisinin as it is known in English. After successful animal trials, Tu tested the compound on herself. A year later, while working on confirmation of the structure of the artemisinin, she accidentally synthesised dihydroartemisinin, which is now used in combination with piperaquine to treat malaria.

Tu’s work wasn’t made public internationally until the 1980s. Artemisinin-based combination drugs have been the default treatment for malaria since the early 2000s and have saved millions of lives globally.

Clarice Phelps, Nuclear Chemist

Suw @ Ada Lovelace Day — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 09:30:20 GMT

Clarice Phelps

Clarice Phelps is a nuclear chemist who was part of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) team that worked with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research to discover tennessine (element 117). She is the first African-American woman to have contributed to the discovery of a chemical element.

Tennessine, a synthetic superheavy element, is the second heaviest element in the periodic table. Phelps was part of the ORNL team that purified the berkelium-249 which would be fused with calcium-48 in a high-energy particle accelerator in Russia to create tennessine.

“We spent months pouring over calculations, preparing reagents, putting items in the glove box, going over everything over and over and over again,” Phelps told The Brilliant.

Berkelium-249 has a half-life of 330 days, but the sample needed to be used within six months for the experiment to work. Despite Russian officials rejecting the package twice due to incomplete paperwork, the berkelium-249 eventually made it to Russia in June 2009. The discovery of tennessine was announced in April 2010 and officially recognised in 2015.

Phelps is now the program manager for the Ni-63 and Se-75 industrial use isotope programs at ORNL, and is working on methods for separating actinide and lanthanide isotopes for medical use.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @ClaricePhelps39.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/claricephelps

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