Stories by The Lost Women of Science Initiative

When poet Jessy Randall saw that so many female scientists weren’t getting their due, she got mad. And then she decided to write poems for as many as she could

In the 1970s a young psychologist challenged a popular theory of how we acquire language, launching a fierce debate that continues to this day

Melba Phillips co-authored a paper with J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1935 that proved important in the development of nuclear physics. Later she became an outspoken critic of nuclear weapons

Annie Maunder was an astronomer who expanded our understanding of the sun at the turn of the 20th century. Her passion was photographing eclipses.

The Morris sisters made significant contributions to botany and entomology, but their stories were erased from the history of early American science, both accidentally and by design.

Ursula Bellugi was fixated on how we learn language. Her groundbreaking research on sign language demonstrated the connection between language skills and biology

In 1910 an Anglo-Irish woman named Lilian Bland built a plane with little to no encouragement from her family or aviation enthusiasts. Shortly after the plane took off, she quit flying and moved on to her next challenge

Black nurses worked through unsanitary conditions and racial prejudice to help patients through the debilitating disease TB before a cure was found—with their help

Sara Little Turnbull used materials science to invent and design products for the modern world

Ruby Payne-Scott and her colleagues unlocked a new way of seeing the universe, but to keep her job, Ruby had to keep a big secret.

Sallie Pero Mead made major discoveries about how electromagnetic waves propagate that allowed objects to be detected at a distance

Canadian radiation oncologist Vera Peters pioneered the use of lumpectomies and postoperative radiation to treat breast cancer patients.

Annie Montague Alexander went on paleontology expeditions most women could only dream of in the early 1900s

Emma Unson Rotor worked on the proximity fuze, a groundbreaking piece of World War II weapons technology that the U.S. War Department called “second only to the atomic bomb.”

This early feminist fought for the credit she deserved for her deductive reasoning system and her educational qualifications

Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventorMária Telkes illuminated the field of solar energy. She invented a solar oven, a solar desalination kit and, in the late 1940s, designed one of the first solar-heated houses

Eunice Newton Foote showed that carbon dioxide traps the heat of the sun in 1856, beating the so-called father of the greenhouse effect by at least three years. Why was she forgotten?

Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first Black woman in the U.S. to receive an M.D., earned while the Civil War raged, and the first Black person in the country to write a medical book, a popular guide with a preventive approach

Flemmie Pansy Kittrell, the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in nutrition in 1936, showed the importance of good health and developed a program that became the model for Head Start

It's a global pandemic. The year is not 2020 but 1918, and Harriet Jane Lawrence is developing a vaccine against the deadliest influenza outbreak the world has ever seen

How Elizebeth Smith Friedman went from scouring Shakespeare for secret codes to taking down a Nazi spy ring

Eight pages hidden in an archive led to the discovery of the story of Christine Essenberg

Sarah Loguen Fraser was the daughter of abolitionists and one of the first African American female doctors trained after the Civil War.

Lillian Gilbreth pioneered time and motion efficiency in workplaces and revolutionized kitchen design