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10 Most Famous Women In STEM

Commodore Grace M. Hopper, USNR Official portrait photograph by James S. Davis –

STEM is an umbrella term used to group together the distinct but related technical disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. For the longest time, the fields of STEM have been male-dominated, but recently women have broken the gender barriers to establishing their significance in these industries. Throughout history, we have women who have excelled and left significant marks in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The efforts of these women haven’t gone unrecognized, as they have been recognized by the state amongst other stakeholders in the industry. These women have also served as an inspiration to many other women behind them to pursue careers in STEM. In this article, we feature the 10 most famous women in STEM, highlighting their contributions.

1. Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights.

During her 33-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform tasks. This led to her recognition by NASA for her historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist.

2. Marie Curie

Marie Curie by Henri Manuel –

Marie Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.

Marie was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Â鶹APP. In addition to her Nobel Prizes, she has received numerous other honours and tributes; in 1995 she became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Â鶹APP Panthéon, and Poland declared 2011 the Year of Marie Curie during the International Year of Chemistry. She is the subject of numerous biographical works, and she is also known as Madame Curie.

3. Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA while at King’s College London.

Working under John Desmond Bernal, Franklin led pioneering work at Birkbeck on the molecular structures of viruses. On the day before she was to unveil the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus at an international fair in Brussels, Franklin died of ovarian cancer at the age of 37 in 1958. Her team member Aaron Klug continued her research, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982. Read more remarquable Facts about Rosalind Franklin. 

4. Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-shiung Wu by Smithsonian Institution –

Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions to the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. 

Wu is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include the First Lady of Physics, the Chinese Madame Curie and the Queen of Nuclear Research.

5. Barbara McClintock

Barbara McClintock was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome to physical traits. She demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized as among the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

McClintock’s research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s, as other scientists confirmed the mechanisms of genetic change and protein expression that she had demonstrated in her maize research in the 1940s and 1950s. Awards and recognition for her contributions to the field followed, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; as of 2022, she remains the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.

6. Mae Jemison

Mae Carol Jemison by NASA –

Mae Jemison is an American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut. She became the first black woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992. Jemison joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 1987 and was selected to serve for the STS-47 mission, during which the Endeavour orbited the Earth for nearly eight days on September 12–20, 1992.

Jemison left NASA in 1993 and founded a technology research company. She later formed a non-profit educational foundation and through the foundation is the principal of the 100-Year Starship project funded by DARPA. Jemison also wrote several books for children and appeared on television several times, including in a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She holds several honorary doctorates and has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame. Read more interesting facts about Mae Jemison. 

7. Tu Youyou

Tu Youyou is a Chinese pharmaceutical chemist and malariologist.  She discovered artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine, saving millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.

For her work, Tu received the 2011 Lasker Award in clinical medicine and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with William C. Campbell and Satoshi ÅŒmura. Tu is the first Chinese Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and the first female citizen of the People’s Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category.

8. Margaret Hamilton

Computer scientist Margaret Hamilton by NASA –

Margaret Hamilton is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo program. She later founded two software companies, Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She is one of the people credited with coining the term software engineering. Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions.

9. Ada Yonath

Ada Yonath is a Nobel laureate crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes. She is the current director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

In 2009, Yonath received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, becoming the first Israeli woman to win the Nobel Prize out of ten Israeli Nobel laureates, the first woman from the Middle East to win a Nobel prize in the sciences, and the first woman in 45 years to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

10. Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. 

Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and the FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended to create COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. Among her many awards, On November 22, 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.  Read more interesting facts about Grace Hopper.