Sara Seager

Sara Seager is a Canadian-American planetary scientist and astronomer who is well known for her work on the analysis and discovery of exoplanets. She also developed a version of the Drake equation to allow the estimation of other habitable planets around our galaxy.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Countess of Lovelace self described as an analyst and metaphysician, and called her approach to mathematics and analytics as “poetical science”. She was an English mathematician and writer who was well known for her work on Charles Babbage’s mechanical computer, the Analytical Machine. It was Ada Lovelace who recognized the machine’s use beyond pure calculation.

Marie Curie

Maria Skłodowska-Curie was a Polish chemist and physicist known for pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to ever win a Nobel Prize, and the only person to ever win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. In 1906, she became the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.

Maria Merian

Maria Sibylla Merian was a German naturalist, entomologist, and scientific illustrator who became one of the earliest naturalists to observe and document insects directly, in a time where insects were still largely regarded as “beast of the devil”. Maria documented the life cycles of 186 different insect species, directly contradicting the evidence at the time that insect were born of spontaneous generation.

Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson was the first African-American woman to work at NASA as a scientist. She was a mathematician who spent 33 years at NASA mastering complex manual calculations and whose calculations of orbital mechanics were crucial to the success of the first crewed space flights in the United States.

Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was a Chinese-American suffragette and activist. At just 15, Lee led a parade of 10,000 people in New York City for women's rights. She earned a degree in Economics from Columbia University in 1921 and went on to do postwar economics. 

Valerie Thomas

Valerie Thomas is a data scientist and inventor who created the illusion transmitter, patented in 1980. During her time with NASA, Valerie Thomas developed real-time computer data systems that supported the satellite control centers, and developed the digital media formats used in image processing systems with the Landsat program.