Her Stem Space

Lillian Gilbreth began her career with her husband inventing a time and motion study. They would analyze ways to lessen human error, make tasks more efficient, and increase the safety and satisfaction of workers. After her husband’s death she went onto become the first female engineering professor at Purdue. She also became the author of the first book to combine  psychology and parts of management theory. Furthermore she was the first woman elected for the national academy of engineering

Edith Clarke was the first female electrical engineer in the United States to hold a professional position. She began as a math teacher but after becoming ill she made the decision to return to school. She decided to study engineering. She would attend MIT and earn a masters in electrical engineering. She struggled finding work but nothing discouraged her. She would go on to invent the graphing calculator.

Ellen Ochoa was an astronaut through the Johnson Space center. She served on the nine day mission, STS-56 on the space shuttle Discovery.   She was the first Hispanic woman to go to space. She would have a grand total of  four times in space and logged almost 1000 hours in space. She would later serve as the director of a Johnson Space center. She was the first Hispanic person and second woman to hold this position.

Katherine Johnson was one of the first African American students at West Virginia university where she enrolled in their graduate math program. She  began working at the national advisory committee for aeronautics, she dealt with mathematical calculations. Her and the other women part of this program were essential for the early U.S. space program. The national advisory committee for aeronautics would later be incorporated into the national aeronautics and space administration. She would go on to play an important role in NASA’s Mercury program. She calculated the path for freedom 7, the space act that carried the first American astronaut into space, and calculated when and where to launch the rocket for Apollo 11, which launched the first men to the moon.

Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician who has become known as the first computer programmer. Ada hypothesized that an automatic digital computer created by Charles Babbage could be programmed to follow a list of instructions. These ideas helped inspire Alan Turing’s work on the first modern computers. She is considered the first person to acknowledge that computers could be used for more than mathematical calculations.

Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in America to revive a medical degree. She decided to pursue medicine after a dying friend said it would have been better if she had a female physician. At the time there were few medical colleges and none that accepted women. In spite of this she applied to Geneva college. This admission stemmed from a joke but that did not stop her. She would revive her medical degree. Furthermore she would go on to establish her own dispensary and medical college for women.

Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte was a Native American who went on to attend Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. If she graduated she would become America’s first Native American doctor. She was not allowed to vote as a woman and craved discrimination based on being a Native American. Nonetheless she graduated as valedictorian. She would then return to the Omaha reservation and serve as the only doctor for over 1200 across more than 400 miles. Later on with the help of her husband and donations she created the first hospital not funded by the government on a reservation.

Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu is a pioneer in the field of physics. She worked with experimental physics. During her life she became the first woman hired as faculty at the Princeton physics department. Her major contributions to physics include proving the first confirmation of Enrico Fermi’s 1933 theory of beta decay. Betsy decay is the process of protons in an unstable element being converted into Neptune’s and vice versa. She was also recruited to prove that the conservation of parity did not stand true during beta decay.