Amazing female scientists to inspire your daughters

American biochemist Jennifer Doudna, along with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, created the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Bacteria use the CRISPR system to capture DNA segments of invading viruses. From these snippets they create CRISPR arrays, used to produce RNA segments that destroy virus DNA. Doudna and her lab replaced the arrays with a "guide RNA" to cut particular places in the genome. The use of this technology, which could eradicate disease, has caused ethical debate.

Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco was the imaging scientist for NASA's Voyager mission and the imaging team leader for the Cassini mission on Saturn. She was instrumental in capturing the "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth.

During graduate school at University of Cambridge in 1967, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell helped build a radio telescope that enabled her to identify pulsars, rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit radiation. The discovery helped future scientist explore space-time and dark regions of the universe.

Back in 1974, her supervisor Anthony Hewish won the Nobel Prize for the discovery. In 2018, Bell Burnell was officially recognized and was awarded $3 million along with the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Geneticist Barbara McClintock spent her life studying corn and discovered that genes could move. Depending on their location, these "jumping genes" could reversibly alter the expression of other genes. In 1983, thirty years after her discovery, she received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, the first lone woman to receive this award.

Fletcher, a literal rocket scientist, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017. The 22 year old is currently working for the Boeing Company, where she is continuing her work on NASA's Space Launch System, a rocket designed to go to Mars.

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Jacqueline Barton is a chemistry professor at the California Institute of Technology. She was awarded the American Chemical Society's Priestley Medal in 2015 for her work on electron transport in DNA, which helps cells discover and repair mistakes. Barton's recent research shows that disruption in this transport process may contribute to cancer.

Chandrasekar recently graduated from Harvard with a degree in biomedical engineering, with focus on the intersection of health care and tech. While still in high school, she created ProjectCSGIRLS, a nonprofit organization that encourages girls in middle school to pursue computer engineering. She is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar to India studying why the Indian school system fails to support autistic students with learning disabilities.

In 1987, Astronaut Mae Jemison became the first black woman admitted to NASA's astronaut training program. In 1992, she flew aboard the Endeavor mission into space. After leaving NASA, Jemison created an international space camp for teenagers and remains outspoken on the need to encourage women to enter STEM fields.

Computer scientist Grace Hopper, born in 1906, was a mathematician and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. She helped program the first all-electronic digital computer, called UNIVAC. The stations NASA used to track the Apollo moon missions employed UNIVAC technology to communicate with astronauts.

In 1971, Eugenia Kalnay—now an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland—was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has worked with NASA and the National Weather Service to improve weather prediction models, but her current work focuses on increasing rain and vegetation with windmills and solar panels in large desert areas like the Sahara.

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Chemist Stephanie Kwolek invented Kevlar—the material used in bullet-proof vests—which was produced by Dupont in 1971. The fibers are five times stronger than steel and are used in a variety of products, for example, in protective sleeving for underwater cables and ropes that suspend bridges.

Elion graduated with a masters degree in chemistry in 1941. She helped develop antiviral drugs to treat childhood and adult leukemia as well as medicine that helps prevent organ rejection after kidney transplants. In 1983, she aided in the development of azidothymidine (AZT), the first drug approved in the fight against AIDS. She and two male coworkers received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1988.

Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt discovered about 2,400 variable stars from 1907–1921. She studied properties of stars by looking at photographic plates and discovered that certain stars have a consistent brightness. These "Cepheid variables" can be used to calculate astronomical distances, which is how astronomer Edwin Hubble realized the universe was expanding.

Helen B. Taussig, known as the founder of pediatric cardiology, worked with a team that helped develop an operation to treat babies born with a congenital heart defect responsible for "blue baby" syndrome. The procedure laid the groundwork for adult open heart surgery.

The nuclear physicist, who was nicknamed the "Chinese Madame Curie," worked on the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the atomic bomb. Wu also disproved the law of parity, the quantum mechanics law that holds that two physical systems like atoms are mirror images that behave in the same way. Her colleagues received a Nobel Prize in 1957 for this work, but like many female scientists of the era, she was excluded.

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The calculations of astronomer Vera Rubin showed galaxies must contain more matter than is visible, resulting in the discovery that at least 90% of the observable universe is invisible dark matter.

Physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer, along with a male colleague, won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the shell nuclear model of the atomic nucleus. The model explains why some atoms are more stable than others.

Mária Telkes, a physical chemist and biophysicist, developed ways to store solar energy and invented the first residential solar-powered heating system. In 1940, she joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Solar Energy Conversion Project, where she researched how to heat a home solely with solar energy.

British scientist Rosalind Franklin, who died of ovarian cancer at 37, contributed to the discovery of DNA. Franklin led the team that created "Photo 51," the image that revealed the double-helix structure of DNA. Some say Franklin deserves more credit in the DNA discovery.

Often overshadowed by her parents Pierre and Marie Curie, Irène Joliot-Curie was an accomplished scientist in her own right. She was a nurse radiographer during World War I, and she and her husband shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for their synthesis of new radioactive elements. Her research also helped future scientists to discover uranium fission.

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In 1962, mathematician Katherine Johnson, portrayed by actress Taraji P. Henson in the movie "Hidden Figures," developed the equations that helped map out the orbital mission of John Glenn. Johnson also provided calculations that contributed to getting astronauts to the moon and back.

Astrophysicist Jedidah Isler focuses on hyperactive supermassive black holes, also known as blazars, in distant galaxies. In 2014, she became the first black woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Yale. She hosts VanguardSTEM, a monthly web series that features women of color in the STEM field.

Elizabeth Blackwell entered the field of medicine in the mid-1800s, a time when women weren't welcome in medical schools. After she was finally admitted to Geneva Medical College in New York, she became the first woman in America to graduate with a medical degree and to practice medicine as a doctor. In 1868, she opened the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary.

Molecular biologist Cynthia Kenyon's research field is the genetics of aging. She is a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco and the president of aging research for Google's Calico, a research and development company focused on health and longevity. In 1993, Kenyon discovered that in C. elegans roundworms the rate of aging is subject to genetic control and does not happen automatically.

Nina Tandon, a biomedical engineer, is the CEO and co-founder of EpiBone, a company that uses a patient's stem cells to grow new human bones for skeletal reconstruction.

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Sunetra Gupta is a novelist and theoretical epidemiology professor at University of Oxford. Her scientific work focuses on infectious diseases. Together with her team, she recently made a breakthrough discovery that could lead to long-term flu vaccines.

Chinese phytochemist Tu YouYou created one of the world's most effective drugs to fight malaria. YouYou shared the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Ethologist Jane Goodall has researched chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania since the 1960s. Her long-term research has allowed people to better understand chimpanzees. She, for example, discovered that chimps can make tools, display social behaviors, and are omnivores.

Actress Hedy Lamarr, who co-starred alongside Clark Gable in the 1940s, helped create the technology that led to modern wireless capabilities. During World War II, she worked with composer George Antheil to develop a "secret communications system" that would send radio signals over different frequencies to prevent enemies from figuring out the messages.

Ada Yonath, a protein crystallographer, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her work on the atomic structure and function of ribosomes. These particles are present in all living cells and serve as the site of protein synthesis.

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