Meet the Women Scientists of TIME 100
by Alexandra Sifferlin, Time Magazine
April 16, 2015
It will surprise no one to learn that women are vastly underrepresented in the field of science. But in this year's TIME 100, five outstanding women who are making huge strides in the fields of medicine, genetics, and infectious disease, made the list.
Read more about these five influential scientists.
Dr. Joanne Liu, International President of Doctors Without Borders
Liu and her team were the first to respond to the Ebola outbreak in Guinea. Liu has become a leader in the outbreak, and has fiercely and publicly criticized the international community for its slow response to the outbreak.
Emmanuelle Charpentier & Jennifer Douda, Creators of Gene-Editing Technology
Charpentier and Doudna have developed a groundbreaking gene-editing technique called CRISPR-Cas9, which allows scientists to add or remove genetic material as they please. The process has major implications for a variety of health problems from HIV to sickle cell anemia to cancer. In theory, CRISPR-Cas9 could be used to edit any human gene. Read more here.
The Incredible True Tale of "The Queen of Neuroscience" and Her Nobel Prize
by Nico Pitney, The Huffington Post
February 19, 2015
A little girl raised on a faraway island. Her town is small, deeply religious. Dancing is forbidden; family members speak of spirits, and superstitions abound. Her parents are not well-off, do not attend university.But her mother, who once dreamed of being a doctor, wants better for her daughter. She insists the girl study hard. She reads her fairy tales in which heroes overcome poverty with their smarts. "We are born naked, and we're going to die naked, so don't care about material things," she tells her daughter. Instead, follow your passion.
Flash forward forty years. The little girl has become "the queen of neuroscience." With a beaming smile, May-Britt Moser rose to accept the Nobel Prize in physiology. Her work helped solve a problem "that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries," the Nobel committee wrote, and she was the only woman to receive a Nobel prize in the sciences in 2014. Read more here.
Against All Odds: Women in Developing Countries Succeed in STEM Fields
by Susan Brink, U.S. News & World Report
August 5, 2014
Against all odds, Simone Badal McCreath dreamed of being a physician. Her mother had left the family when she was young. She and her stepmother didn't get along. She grew up in a poor community and no one in her family had ever gone to college. "This is the developing world," she says from her home in Jamaica. "You have challenges."
But her father, an uneducated but "brilliant" shopkeeper, she says, wanted his children to get an education. It wasn't easy. One of McCreath's challenges in high school was a lack of science teachers, so it wasn't until she arrived at the University of the West Indies that a light went off. Read more here.
Three Generations of Doctors - All Women
by Sally Friedman, The Inquirer
May 8, 2014
They are a rarity, indeed: Grandmother, mother, daughter - all doctors.
Even rarer: Because of the profession's relatively brief history of equal access, each woman's life experience illustrates the very different eras in which they received their training - and, in some cases, reared children.
Geraldine Prose Young, who applied to medical school in the 1940s - against the odds - was scorned as an irresponsible mother.
Nancy Young Melin, a generation later, was surrounded by many working mothers struggling to balance life and work.
As for Claire Melin, she graduates from medical school on May 16 - with a class that is half women.
Trial by Fire
Growing up in the Bronx, Geraldine knew that family and education were important. But her mother also instilled a sense of self-worth.
"I was always told that I could do anything - absolutely anything," said Geraldine, now 87. "If my older brother could become a doctor, my mother said, so could I." Read more here.