In the past, women in STEM were not always given the full credit and respect they deserve for their work. Many women are invaluable to the scientific and technological advancements we have today. Here are five of the many women in STEM who led amazing careers and added immeasurable knowledge to their fields.
Beatrice Shilling
Beatrice Shilling was an aeronautical engineer and motorcycle racer. Shilling was on the University of Manchester’s motorcycle racing team, and raced at the world’s first motor racing circuit, the Brooklands track. In 1934 she made a lap of the circuit at a speed of 100 miles per hour, earning the Brooklands Gold Star.
In 1926 at age 17 she worked as an apprentice for an electrical engineering company. The company was run by a founder of the Women’s Engineering Society, Margaret Partridge. The society supported Shilling as she pursued a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Manchester. Shilling was the first of two women to study engineering at the university.
After her graduation she worked for the Royal Aircraft Establishment, or RAE, where she specialized in aircraft carburetors. Her most well-known work was solving a problem with Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes during World War 2. Whenever the planes began a nosedive, the carburetor flooded and the engine stalled. Shilling designed a device called the RAE restrictor, which prevented the engine from flooding. For her work, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire and an honorary doctorate from the University of Surrey.
Alice Augusta Ball
Alice Augusta Ball graduated from the University of Washington in 1914 (after graduating from high school in 1910) with two degrees: pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy. She received a master’s degree from the University of Hawai’i. Ball later taught chemistry at the university, and became the chemistry department head.
Ball began studying leprosy after she was asked to work with Henry Hollmann on his research team. Leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, is a bacterial infection. During Ball’s time there was a lot of stigma, or shame, around leprosy. Patients in Hawai’i with the condition were often isolated in a facility on the island of Molokai, because the available treatments were not very effective and it led to death in many cases.
Ball isolated some of the active components of chaulmoogra oil, which had been used topically to treat leprosy. She made the isolated components injectable, which was far more effective at treating the condition. Her injection is called the Ball method. Dagmawi Abebe directed a short film about Ball’s life, called The Ball Method, if you would like to know more about her work.
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin was a chemist. She studied chemistry at Newnham College and received a PhD in chemistry from Cambridge, where she studied the physical chemistry of solid organic colloids. Her thesis focused on the porosity, or empty spaces, in coal. Her academic work was influenced by her previous work studying coal porosity at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association.
Franklin studied x-rays at King's College London with her student Raymond Gosling during the 1950s. During their research they were able to take pictures of DNA. They found that there were two types of DNA, which they called a dry form and a wet form. Their pictures were a major part of discovering the structure of DNA. Unfortunately, Franklin’s pictures were used as part of the basis of a Nobel Prize-winning model of DNA without credit to her or her student.
After leaving King’s College, Franklin worked at Birkbeck College and studied viruses and RNA. Her team’s work formed some of the foundation of structural virology, which examines how viruses enter host cells.
Chien-Shiung Wu
Chien-Shiung Wu studied physics in Shanghai during post-secondary, and completed her PhD at Berkeley. Before World War 2 she taught physics at Princeton and Smith College. During the war she joined the Manhattan Project, which was a research and development project that produced the first nuclear weapons. Wu’s research focused on radiation detectors.
After leaving the project when the war ended, Wu got a research position at Columbia University studying beta decay. Beta decay happens in a nucleus that has too many neutrons or protons, so one of them is transformed into the other. In collaboration with two theoretical physicists, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, Wu came up with an experiment to prove that identical nuclear particles do not always act alike. Lee and Yang received a Nobel Prize for their work, but unfortunately Wu’s work was not recognized.
Wu made considerable contributions to the field of physics. She was the first woman president of the American Physical Society, and was dubbed “The First Lady of Physics” and “The Queen of Nuclear Research”. Wu published Beta Decay in 1965, which is still referenced by physicists.
Mary Golda Ross
In 1928 Mary Golda Ross earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Northeastern State Teacher’s College. Ross taught math and science in Oklahoma for nine years, before getting a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Northern Colorado.
During World War 2, Ross began working for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation as a mathematician. In her work, she addressed problems with high-speed flight and aeroelasticity. After the war she went to UCLA to become professionally certified in engineering, and joined the Lockheed Skunk Works program, the first woman engineer out of 40 engineers on the team. The Skunk program develops and designs aircrafts. Ross made fundamental contributions to the development of the Agena rocket program, which was a huge step toward the U.S.A.’s moon landing project.
Ross was a foundational presence in aerospace engineering. According to the Cherokee Phoenix article “Mary Golda Ross: Mathematician, engineer, and inspiration” linked below, Ross attributed her astounding engineering career to her education and proficient skills in mathematics as well as her values as a Cherokee woman.
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Resources
Ackerley, B. (n.d.). Alice Ball. New Scientist. Retrieved from https://www.newscientist.com/people/alice-ball/
Bark, L. (2021, March 2). Mary Golda Ross: Mathematician, engineer and Inspiration. cherokeephoenix.org. Retrieved from https://www.cherokeephoenix.org/education/mary-golda-ross-mathematician-engineer-and-inspiration/article_35dde35c-7b67-11eb-a57a-df1679a79491.html
Beatrice Shilling - Scitation. Physics Today. (2019, March 8). Retrieved from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.6.20190308a/full/
Biography.com Editors. (2014, April 2). Rosalind Franklin. Biography.com. Retrieved from https://www.biography.com/scientist/rosalind-franklin
Smeltzer, R. K. (2019). Chien-Shiung Wu. Atomic Heritage Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/chien-shiung-wu