1947-
British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell assisted in constructing a large radio telescope and discovered pulsars, cosmic sources of peculiar radio pulses.
1943-
Annie Jump Cannon was a pioneering astronomer responsible for the classification of hundreds of thousands of stars.
1863-1941
Rachel Carson was a marine biologist, environmentalist and writer who alerted the world to the environmental impact of fertilizers and pesticides.
1907-1964
Marie Curie was a Polish-born French physicist famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize.
1867-1934
1921-2003
1875-1948
American biochemist and pharmacologist Gertrude B. Elion helped develop drugs to treat leukemia and prevent kidney transplant rejection. She won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1988.
1918-1999
Dian Fossey was a zoologist best known for researching the endangered gorillas of the Rwandan mountain forest from the 1960s to the '80s, and for her mysterious murder.
1932-1985
British chemist Rosalind Franklin is best known for her role in the discovery of the structure of DNA ,and for her pioneering use of X-ray diffraction.
1920-1958
Jane Goodall created one of the most trailblazing studies of primates in modern times when she dwelled with Tanzanian chimps to observe their behavior.
1934-
Temple Grandin is a noted animal expert and advocate for autistic populations who has penned the books Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human.
1947-
Alice Hamilton was a physician and authority on lead poisoning and industrial disease. The NIOSH present an award in her name.
1869-1970
1750-1848
Naturalist Terri Irwin is well-known as the widow of wildlife expert Steve Irwin. The couple co-hosted the Animal Planet show The Crocodile Hunter.
1964-
Doctor Mae C. Jemison is the first African-American woman ever to be a U.S. astronaut. In 1992, she flew into space aboard the Endeavour.
1956-
Mary Leakey was a paleoanthropologist who, along with husband Louis, made several prominent scientific discoveries. Skull fossils found by the Leakeys advanced our understanding of human evolution.
1913-1996
Rita Levi-Montalcini shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for her part in the discovery of a protein that stimulates nerve cell growth.
1909-2012
1902-1992
1818-1889
1942-
1962-
Chemist, sanitation engineer, and home economist Ellen Richards opened scientific education and professions to women when she started teaching at MIT in 1884.
1842-1911
In 1983, astronaut and astrophysicist Sally Ride became the first American woman in space aboard the space shuttle Challenger. Ride died on July 23, 2012 at the age of 61, following a battle with pancreatic cancer.
1951-2012
1871-1953
1915-1980
Rosalyn S. Yalow was a Nobel Prize-winning medical physicist who conducted groundbreaking research on type II diabetes.
1921-