Sylvia Alice Earle was born in Gibbstown, New Jersey. Her parents were nature lovers and encouraged her interest in the natural world and exploring the nearby woods. At 12, the family moved to Dunedin, Florida, by the waterfront, and she became fascinated by the seagrass beds and salt marshes. In 1952, at 17, after receiving an associate degree from St. Petersburg Jr. College, she went to study Botany at Florida State University and learned to dive with SCUBA gear. She continued her education at Duke University, writing her thesis on algae in the Gulf of Mexico, and received her Doctorate of Phycology (the scientific study of algae) in 1966. In 1965, at 30, Earle began her lifelong research career when accepting a position as Cape Haze Marine Laboratories resident director in Sarasota, Florida. Two years later, she became a research fellow at the Farlow Herbarium of Harvard University and joined the Radcliffe Institute as a research scholar. In one of her research dives in 1968, Earle discovered undersea dunes off the Bahamas coast. In 1970, 35 years old Earle led the first all-female team of aquanauts as part of the Tektite II experiment – an underwater housing and laboratory about 50 feet (15 meters) below the surface of Great Lameshur Bay off the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Throughout the two-week experiment, she documented the impacts of pollution on coral reefs. It was the first of many undersea researches Earle led over her career, which included expeditions to China, the Bahamas, and the Galapagos Islands. She began to work with the National Geographic Society, producing films and books on life in Earth’s oceans, and in 1979, was appointed curator of phycology at the California Academy of Sciences. That year, at 44, Earle set a new world record for untethered diving by descending 1,250 feet (381 meters) into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, wearing a JIM diving suit – a specialized apparatus designed to maintain internal pressure equivalent to 1 standard atmosphere. In 1982, Earle and engineer Graham Hawkes, who later became her third husband, founded Deep Ocean Engineering and Deep Ocean Technology, a company that designs, supports, and operates piloted and robotic subsea systems. Within three years, they built the Deep Rover research submarine that can reach 3000 feet (914 meters) beneath the ocean’s surface. In 1990, Earle left the company to serve as Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the first woman to serve in this position. During her post, she led numerous expeditions to research the environmental damage caused by Iraq’s demolition of Kuwaiti oil wells during the Persian Gulf War. In 1992, she founded another marine technology company called Deep Ocean Exploration and Research. Over the following decades, Earle continued leading expeditions and setting more records as the first woman chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the first woman explorer in residence of the National Geographic Society. In 2009, Earle received a million-dollar prize from TED. It enabled her to found Mission Blue, a non-profit organization advocating for exploring and protecting the ocean and working to establish Hope Spots (marine protected areas) worldwide. The organization’s goal is to achieve 30% ocean protection by 2030, and as of 2020, its created more than 120 Hope Spots. Throughout her 60-year career, Earle has logged over 7,000 hours underwater, published over 150 scientific papers, and led over a hundred expeditions. Read more...

Ynés Enriquetta Julietta Mexía was born in Washington, DC, where her father worked as a Mexican diplomat. When she was 3, her parents separated, her father returned to Mexico, and she, her mother, and six half-siblings moved around until settling down in Maryland. At 17, after completing her studies, she intended to join a convent but eventually moved to Mexico to supervise her father’s ranch, which she took over after he died. In 1897, at 27, Mexía married her first husband. After he died in 1904, she operated a pet and poultry stock-raising business and remarried. After her second husband bankrupted her company, she divorced him in 1906. Following a mental and physical breakdown, 39 years old Mexía left Mexico to receive medical treatment in San Francisco. There, she became active in the early environmental movement in California and joined the Sierra Club and Save the Redwoods League. She began hiking, went camping, and became interested in nature, specifically plants. In 1921, at 51, Mexía enrolled at UC Berkeley to study botany and began to collect and categorize plants. Four years later, she went on her first plant-collecting expedition to Mexico. Soon, she realized she preferred to work alone and broke off from her group, collecting 500 specimens in two months. During the next 13 years, Mexía traveled the Americas, collecting plants from Tierra del Fuego on the border of Chile and Argentina to the northern regions of Alaska. Mexía stood out not only by the number of expeditions she had or the mileage she covered but also by being an older woman who traveled alone on horseback, wearing trousers, and camping outdoors. Mexía regularly published the documentation of her adventures in the Audubon Society of the Pacific’s newsletter. While not on one of her expeditions, she lectured about them at various scientific organizations. In 1938, Mexía got sick during her expedition in Mexico. She had to cut the trip short and go back to the US. She died from lung cancer the following month at 68. In only 13 years of her career, Mexía collected over 145,000 plant specimens, discovering 500 new species. Read more...

Born Gerty Theresa Radnitz into a Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She received her primary education at home and later attended an academy for girls, graduating at 16. Inspiring to become a doctor, she completed a year of the necessary studies required for the medical school’s application, including Latin, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. In 1914, at 18, she began her studies at the medical school of the Karl-Ferdinands-Universität in Prague. During school, she met fellow medical student Carl Cori, and they married right after receiving their degree in 1920. Afterward, they moved to Vienna, where she worked at the Carolinen Children’s Hospital, conducting experiments in temperature regulation and publishing papers on blood disorders. Health problems caused by malnutrition during WW1 and the increasing anti-Semitism drove the Coris to leave Europe, and in 1922, they immigrated to the US. They worked together at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, focusing on carbohydrate metabolism, researching the glucose metabolizing in the body and how hormones regulate the process. The couple published fifty papers on the subject, eleven with Cori as the sole author. In 1929, the Coris introduced the Cori cycle, which describes the cellular process in which the body stores sugar in muscles as glycogen, converts it to glucose in the liver, and sends it back to the muscles for energy. Although the Coris were equal in their work, they were not treated as such, and she experienced much chauvinism and prejudice. When the couple looked for an institute that would enable them to work together, they were refused because of Cori’s gender or because, as one university stated, it is “un-American for a married couple to work together.” Eventually, in 1931, the Coris received an offer from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Although they could collaborate, she was offered a research associate position at one-tenth of her husband’s salary. It took 13 years before she was appointed associate professor of Research Biological Chemistry and Pharmacology and four more years to be promoted to full professor, serving in this position until she died. While at Washington University, the Coris continued to research the action mechanism of hormones and discovered what would be known as the Cori ester – a compound in frog muscles that helps to break down glycogen. They also found the enzyme that created the compound and identified that it’s the first step in turning stored energy (glycogen) into glucose. In addition, Cori researched glycogen storage disease by herself and identified several forms related to enzymatic defects. She was the first to present how these defects can cause human genetic disorders. In 1947, for their discovery of the Cori cycle, the Coris won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the first American woman, and the third in the world to win a Nobel Prize in Science. Months before winning the Nobel prize, Cori was diagnosed with myelosclerosis, a bone marrow disease. With declining health, she continued researching and discovering new enzymes and their relations to various health problems. She was also a member of several societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Society of Biological Chemists. She died at 61. Read more...

Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Liuhe, China. Her parents supported her curiosity and interests and believed in equal education for all their children, regardless of gender. She first studied at Ming De School, a girls’ school her father had founded, and at 10, she went to a women’s boarding school that included a teacher training program. This school’s curriculum allowed her to cultivate her growing passion for science. At the time, government regulations ruled that teacher-training college students must serve as schoolteachers for one year before continuing to academic studies. So, she taught at a public school in Shanghai, administrated by the famous philosopher Hu Shih, who became her mentor and father figure. During her free time, she taught herself mathematics, and in 1930, she enrolled at the National Central University in Nanjing, studying mathematics and later switching to physics. After graduating, she worked as an assistant at Zhejiang University and as a researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Academia Sinica. In 1936, at 24, she was accepted to the University of Michigan and moved to the US. Upon her arrival, she discovered that the institute was highly discriminating against women, denying them access via the front entrance. Wu decided to study at a more liberal university and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. An exceptional student, she was chosen by the famous Italian physicist Emilio Segrè to work with him in his beta decay studies that later significantly contributed to the development of nuclear bombs. In 1940, Wu completed her Ph.D. and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa but didn’t get a faculty position. She remained at Berkeley as a post-doctoral fellow at the Radiation Laboratory for two years. In 1942, at 30, she married fellow physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan. The couple moved to the East Coast, where she worked as an assistant professor and later associate professor at Smith College. In 1944, she accepted a position at Princeton University, becoming the first female faculty member of its Physics Department. That same year, she joined the research team of the Manhattan Project, which worked on the atomic bomb development. Based on her Ph.D. dissertation, Wu helped to determine the separation process of uranium into U-235 and U-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion and by that to improve the Geiger counters for the detection of radiation and the enrichment of uranium in large quantities. After WW2, Wu remained at Columbia University, becoming the first woman to serve as a tenured physics professor at Columbia. In 1956, physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang asked her to conduct an experiment proving that the conservation of parity did not apply during beta decay. Though referred to as the “Wu experiment,” she didn’t receive any recognition when Chen and Yang received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for this theory. In the next three decades until her retirement in 1981, she worked on many theories that often crossed over to other scientific fields, including research on the molecular changes in red blood cells that cause sickle-cell anemia, research on magnetism, and Bell’s theorem, in which she confirmed the interpretation of quantum mechanics. In 1975, at 63, she became the first woman to serve as president of the American Physical Society and the first woman to be awarded the National Medal of Science in Physics. In her later years, Wu renewed her activism and became an advocate for various fights and causes. She protested against the imprisonment of the in-laws of physicist Kerson Huang and the journalist Lei Chen in Taiwan, which with her help, was eventually released. She spoke against gender discrimination, especially in the academic world, and promoted teaching STEM subjects to all students, regardless of gender, race, or background. She died following a stroke at the age of 85. Per her wish, her ashes were buried in the courtyard of the Ming De School. Read more...

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was born in New York City, New York. She was a curious child with technological tendencies who loved to dismantle alarm clocks and other household goods to see how they worked. Growing up, she attended private schools, and at 17, she started studying mathematics and physics at Vassar College. After graduating from Phi Beta Kappa, she attended Yale University, receiving her M.A degree in 1930. This same year, at 24, she married Vincent Foster Hopper, keeping the name Hopper after they divorced 15 years later. In the following year, she returned to Vassar as a math teacher while continuing her education at Yale, and in 1934 she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, becoming one of the first women to receive a doctorate in this field. In 1941, when the US entered WW2, the 34-year-old Hopper tried to enlist in the Navi but was rejected because of her age and low weight-to-height ratio. After two years, she applied again and got accepted into the United States Navy (women) Reserve. She took a leave of absence from Vassar and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University. There, she joined the staff who worked on Mark I computer – the first large-scale automatic calculator and co-authored its guidebook, A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. After the war, Hopper stayed at the Harvard Computation Lab for a few more years as a civilian research fellow. In 1949, at 43, she was hired by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. as a head programmer. In this position, she worked on the design of UNIVAC I – the first general-purpose electronic digital computer for business applications and the first large-scale electronic commercial computer. At the time, Hopper recommended developing a programing language that would use English words which later will be translated into code by the computer. After having her initiative rejected, she published a paper about it in 1952, coining the term Compiler to describe the process. It took five more years and a change of management, and in 1957, under the Sperry Rand Corp., Hopper, who was now the first director of automatic programming, oversaw the development of the Flow-Matic – the first English-like data-processing compiler. This programing language has inspired the development of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) in 1960. Over the next decade, Hopper promoted the new language, which gradually was adapted, becoming the most used programming language in the world by the 1970s. While working in the private sector, Hopper maintained her naval career as a reservist until 1966, when she reached 60 and had to retire. It took less than a year before the Navy recalled her to active duty to help standardize its computer languages. In 1971, she retired for the second time, and again, she was asked to return in the following year. In 1973, at the age of 67, Hopper was promoted from commander to captain, and in 1983, to the rank of commodore, which two years later incorporated into rear admiral, becoming one of the Navy’s few women in this rank. Hopper, the oldest serving officer in the Navy, retired from the service for the third time in 1985 at the age of 79. Afterward, she was hired as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, where she mainly served as a goodwill ambassador, giving lectures about computing, its early development, and future potential. In 1991, she became the first woman to be awarded the National Medal of Technology. She died the following year, at the age of 85. Read more...

Jeannette Ridlon Piccard was born in Chicago, Illinois, one of nine children. From an early age, she showed interest in both science and religion, and at the age of 11, she declared that she wanted to become a priest, an unimaginable ambition in those days. She attended Bryn Mawr College, and after receiving her bachelor’s degree in philosophy and psychology, she continued to study organic chemistry at the University of Chicago. In 1919, at 24, she met Jean Felix Piccard, who became her scientific partner and collaborator. After their wedding, they moved to Switzerland for several years, where her husband taught at the University of Lausanne. During this period, Piccard’s brother-in-law, a physics professor, worked on a balloon, researching the upper atmosphere. In 1926, on their return to the US, her husband began to work as director of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined his brother’s balloon project. In 1933, he designed a balloon for the Chicago ‘Century of Progress’ trade show, and Thomas G. W. Settle piloted it. When the balloon returned to the Piccards, the couple decided to fly into the stratosphere. He was in charge of the science, and she of the piloting. The first step to complete the mission was for her to have a piloting license, and on October 23rd, 1934, at the age of 39, Piccard became the first licensed woman balloonist in the US and one of the first in the world. The second step for reaching their goal was to gain financial support, which turned out to be a difficult task for a woman pilot, rejected several times because “it was too risky for a woman and a mother.” Eventually, the Piccards raised enough funding, and on October 23rd, 1934, the couple accented from Dearborn, Michigan, and landed in Cadiz, Ohio, after an eight hours flight, in which they achieved an altitude of 57,579 feet, and she made history as the first woman in the stratosphere. She kept her record for 29 years until 1963, when the Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. After the flight, she received publicity for her achievement, and the Piccards began to give lectures on their adventure, promoting women in aviation. In 1936, they moved to Minnesota, where her husband received a teaching post, and she continued her education, earning a doctorate in 1942, at the age of 47. In 1963, her husband died, and Piccard was offered a position as consultant to the Director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center, overseeing the moon landing in 1969. Over time, her interest shifted from space to religion, and her childhood dream of becoming a priest was rekindled. In 1971, only one year after the Episcopal Church began to admit female deacons, she was ordained a deacon. Three years later, at the age of 79, she was ordained as an Episcopal priest at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, alongside ten other women who became known as the Philadelphia Eleven. Afterward, she served as an assistant pastor at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church and volunteered as a chaplain at St. Luke’s Hospital in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She died from cancer at 86, after a lifetime of challenging the conventions of what a respectable lady could and should do. Read more...

Susan Diane Wojcicki was born in Palo Alto, California, and grew up on the Stanford campus, where her father taught physics. After graduating from Gunn High School, she attended Harvard University, studying history and literature to earn a Ph.D. in economics and pursue an academic career. In 1993, at 25, Wojcicki completed her master’s degree in economics at the University of California, followed by a Master of Business Administration from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. During her studies, she worked as a management consultant in R.B. Webber & Company and Bain & Company and at Intel’s marketing division. In 1998, at 30, Wojcicki married Dennis Troper, and the couple settled in Menlo Park, California. In that same year, she rented her garage space to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, who turned it into its headquarters. In the following year, Wojcicki joined Google as its first marketing manager and 16th employee. In the beginning, she worked on viral marketing programs, heading products such as AdSense, AdWords, and Google Analytics, before developing new services, such as Google Images and Google Books. Under her direction, Google became the leading company for online display advertising. In 2006, she initiated and handled the acquisition of YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars, and within two years, she oversaw two of Google’s biggest acquisitions – DoubleClick and AdMob. In 2010, she became senior vice president of AdWords and AdSense. In 2014, at the age of 46, Wojcicki was named CEO of YouTube. In this position, she is responsible for all the developments of the service, from channel memberships and merchandise to YouTube Premium and YouTube TV, and oversees the website’s localization all over the world. She tightened YouTube’s policy on videos that contain violent and hateful speeches. As a loud advocate against gender discrimination at technology companies, she increased the number of YouTube’s female employees from 24% to 30%. Along with her role at YouTube, Wojcicki serves on the boards of several organizations, including Salesforce, UCLA Anderson School of Management, and Room to Read, an organization that promotes gender equality in education. Wojcicki is also an activist and involved in numerous social causes, such as the expansion of paid family leave, girls in STEM, and support of Syrian refugees. She died of cancer at the age of 56, in 2024. Read more...

Elizabeth Gertrude Britton was born in NYC and grew up in Cuba, where her family owned a furniture factory and sugar plantation. After finishing private high school in NYC, she attended Normal College, and at 17, after receiving a degree in critic and natural sciences, she joined the school’s faculty. At 21, she joined the Torrey Botanical Club, and two years later, she published her first paper in the organization’s journal. She became fascinated with bryology – the study of mosses, and at 25, she published her first scientific work on the subject. At 27, she married Nathaniel Lord Britton, a geologist at Columbia College, and resigned from her teaching position. After the wedding, Britton took an unpaid position at Columbia as a moss collector. In addition, she got appointed the editor of the Torrey Botanical Club’s journal, where, in 1889, she published a series of papers called Contributions to American Bryology. Britton and her husband traveled through the US and the West Indies to collect botanical specimens, and she published her finding and observations in various professional magazines. In 1888, on a trip to England, the Brittons visited the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and decided to establish a comparable institute in NYC. On their return to the US, they proposed their initiative to the Torrey Botanical Club, and within two years, the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) was founded. Britton’s Knowledge of liverworts and mosses contributed to the garden’s collection, and in 1912 she was named Honorary Curator of the Mosses. In 1898, at the age of 40, Britton co-founded the Sullivant Moss Society, later renamed the American Bryological Society, and served as its president from 1916 to 1919. In the early 1900s, Britton became a loud advocate for the conservation of wildflowers. In 1902, when the Wild Flower Preservation Society of America was founded, she was appointed to the Board of Managers, and later she served as the organization’s secretary and treasurer. Devoted to the cause, Britton published papers, gave lectures, and conducted a campaign to adopt regional legislation to preserve and protect wildflowers. Thanks to her efforts, numerous endangered wildflower species were saved throughout the country, including the Wild American holly used as a Christmas decoration. Throughout her life, Britton published more than 300 scientific papers, half of them about mosses. She died at the age of 76 from an apoplectic stroke. Read more...

Maria Mitchell was born and raised in a Quaker family in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Her father was a schoolteacher and amateur astronomer, and from a young age, Mitchell helped him operating his astronomical instruments. She attended the North Grammar school, and at 11, she transferred to the school her father founded, where she was a student and a teaching assistant. Later, she attended Cyrus Peirce’s school for young ladies, where she also worked as a teaching assistant. At 17, Mitchell established her own school, allowing nonwhite children to attend, while the local public school was segregated. Mitchell developed unconventional teaching methods, which she applied in all her teaching positions. She did not report grades or absences, she taught in small classes to individualized attention, and she incorporated mathematics and technology in every lesson. In 1836, at the age of 18, Mitchell began working as a librarian in the Nantucket Atheneum, a job she held for the next 20 years. At nights, she continued assisting her father with geographical calculations and astronomical observations for the US Coast Survey. On October 1, 1847, using a two-inch telescope, the 29 years old, Mitchell had noticed an unknown object flying through the sky, discovering the Comet 1847 VI. Later, the comet will be called “Miss Mitchell’s Comet.” Following her discovery, Mitchell gained national and international acclaim, becoming a celebrity in scientific circles with hundreds of articles written about her and receiving numerous awards, including a gold medal prize presented to her by the King of Denmark. In the following year, Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the first to enter the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At 31, Mitchell moved to Boston to work as an official “computer” for the US Nautical Almanac Office, becoming one of the first women to work for the federal government. In 1865, at 47, with no college education, Mitchell was appointed as the first professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at the new Vassar College. Her research varied, studying Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons, as well as nebulae and solar eclipses. Between 1868 to 1873, Mitchell and her students began a daily recording of sunspots, providing the first consistent photographs of the sun. As a professor, she broke social conventions, insisting that her female students will come to nightly observations. During her two decades at Vassar College, Mitchell and her students frequently published their findings in various academic journals. Mitchell was involved in numerous social issues throughout her life, including the anti-slavery movement and women’s suffrage. She was friends with Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and brought women’s rights activists to Vassar’s observatory to give lectures. Mitchell was a founding member and second president of the Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW) and headed a special committee on Science, promoting and analyzing women’s progress in the field. Mitchell died of brain disease at the age of age 70. Read more...

Susan La Flesche Picotte was born on the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska, the youngest of four sisters. Her father was the last recognized chief of the Omaha people; he believed the tribe should adopt whites’ traditions. Under his assumption, Picotte learned her tribe’s traditions but did not receive an Omaha name and studied at the Presbyterian mission boarding school at the reservation. When Picotte was 8, she witnessed a sick Indian woman prevented medical care from a local white doctor, who let her die because of her origin. She decided to become a physician so she could provide treatment for all the people in need. At 14, Picotte went to study at the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies in New Jersey. After graduation, she returned to the reservation and taught at the Quaker Mission School for two years before continuing her education at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia. In 1886, at the age of 21, she began her medical education at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. On March 14, 1889, when she graduated valedictorian, Picotte became the first Native American in the US to earn a medical degree. Picotte returned to her home at the Omaha Reservation and appointed the physician of the government boarding school, taking care of the student’s health and teaching them about hygiene. The school was closer than any medical facility for the reservation residences, so it became the community clinic, and Picotte provided health care for more than 1,200 people over 450 square miles. For 25 years, Picotte held a fundraising campaign for building a hospital. When it opened in 1913, it was the first hospital privately founded on a reservation. In 1893, at the age of 28, Picotte took some time off to care for her sick mother. In the following year, she married Henry Picotte. After having two sons, she returned to work while her husband took care of the children and the household, an unusual practice at the time. As the reservation’s physician, she took actions to promote health issues to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, a disease that killed hundreds in her community, including her husband. She also served on the health board of Walthill, Nebraska, chaired the state health committee of the Nebraska Federation of Women’s Clubs, and co-founded the Thurston County Medical Society. During this period, Picotte began to advocate for prohibition, speaking against white whiskey peddlers who wanted to sell alcohol to the tribe members and supported her father, the chief of the tribe, in his actions against alcohol consumption within the community. When her husband died in 1905, he left her land in South Dakota that was held in trust by the government. All the heirs, including her minor sons, had to prove competency to sell the land and receive the money. At the age of 40, Picotte found herself in a two years inheritance battle against the government. Following her success, in her free time, she helped other people fight against the system to gain control of their own land and money. After dedicating her life to the welfare of her community, Picotte was diagnosed with bone cancer. She died at the age of 50.   Dive deeper into the inspiring story of Susan La Flesche Picotte with our fun and engaging printable worksheet! Available now on Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers. Read more...