Women Scientists Posters, Prints, & Photographs

Anna Adkins
née Children
b. 3-16-1799; England
d. 6-9-1871; Tivoli Gardens, Paris

Anna Atkins, a botanist and early photographer, used plants to make contact prints, or photograms, for the first book illustrated with photographs. Atkins used the cynotype process that gives a cyan-blue print, familiar as a blueprint.

Sophie Blanchard
b. 3-25-1778; France
d. 7-6-1819; Tivoli Gardens, Paris

Sophie Blanchard, the widow of French ballooning pioneer Jean-Pierre Blanchard, was the first woman to pilot her own balloon and work as a professional balloonist. She performed all around Europe, even crossing the Alps; she lost consciousness several times on high altitude flights and conducted experiements with parachutes. Mme. Blanchard was also the first woman to be killed in an aviation accident when a fireworks display caused her balloon to fail.

Annie Jump Cannon
b. 12-11-1863; Dover, Delaware
d. 4-13-1941; Cambridge, MA

Astronomer Annie Jump Cannon cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification based on their temperatures.

The mnemonic device “Oh, Be A Fine Girl – Kiss Me!” is a mnemonic device for remembering Cannon's “arbitrary” division of stars into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M.

• Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
b. 5-12-1910, Cairo; Egypt
d. 7-29-1994

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is regarded as one of the foremost scientists in the field of X-Ray crystallography studies of natural molecules.

• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in Women in Science composite poster
• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Nobel

Gertrude Elion,
Biochemist
b. 1-23-1918; NYC
d. 2-21-1999, Chapel Hill, NC

Poster Text: “What greater joy can you have than to know what an impact your work has had on people’s lives? The thrill of seeing people get well who otherwise might have died cannot be described in words.” -Gertrude Elion

Shunning traditional trial-and-error methods for finding effective treatments, biochemist Gertrude Elion took an innovative "pathways" approach that relied on determining how cells use chemicals to reproduce and grow. Her research led to the development of drugs to combat several serious medical conditions, including leukemia, malaria, viral herpes, and AIDS.

• more health care practioners posters

Caroline Herschel
b. 3-16-1750; Germany
d. 1-9-1848

Caroline Herschel, the sister and full time assistant of William Herschel, lived most of her 98 years in England. She was the first woman to discover a comet; the recognition earned her an annual salary from King George III.

• astronomers posters

Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace
b. 12-10-1815; England
d. 11-27-1852

Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. She received early training as a mathematician and is considered to have written the first computer program in her correspondence with Charles Babbage about his early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

• Ada, Countess of Lovelace

Florence Nightingale
b. 5-12-1820; Florence, Italy
d. 8-13-1910

Florence Nightingale loved mathematics and her study of mathematics helped her collect data and organize a record keeping system to calculate the mortality rate of soldiers in the hospital.

Anne Pratt
b. 12-5-1806; England
d. 1893

Anne Pratt, a self taught botanist, was one of the best known botanical illustrators of the Victorian age.

Ellen Richards
b. 12-3-1842; Dunstable, MA
d. 3-30-1911

Ellen Richards was a chemist and is consided a founder of the science of ecology.

Poster Text: “The quality of life depends upon the ability of society to teach its members how to live in harmony with their environment – defined first as family, then the community, then the world and its resources.” Ellen S. Richards

Among the first women to formally work as a scientist, Ellen Swallow Richards profoundly impacted people's daily lives. A pioneer in the field of sanitary engineering, she also applied scientific principles to domestic life in creating the field of home economics.

• Ellen Swallow: The Woman Who Founded Ecology
• Women of Science composite poster
• food safety posters
• Heroes of Science & Technology posters
• Places Where Women Made History - National Park Service

Sally Ride
b. 5-26-1951; Encino, CA

Sally Ride, a physicist and NASA astronaut, was the first American woman to enter outerspace in 1983, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger II.

• To Space and Back, Sally Ride

Florence Sabin
b. 11-9-1871; Central City, CO
d. 10-3-1953

Florence Rena Sabin, a medical scientist, was the first woman to hold a full professorship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and the first woman to head a department at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. She came out of retirement to pursued a second career as a public health activist in Colorado.

• Florence Sabin in Women of Science composite poster
• Probing the Unknown: The Story of Dr. Florence Sabin

Mary Fairfax Somerville
b. 12-26-1780; Scotland
d. 11-28-1872; Naples, Italy

At a time when women's participation in science was not encouraged, Mary Somerville studied mathematics and astronomy. She translated Laplace's work, invented variables from algebraic math, was the second woman to receive recognition as a scientist in the United Kingdom after Caroline Herschel.

Maria Telkes
b. 12-12-1900; Hungary
d. 12-2-1995

Maria Telkes, known her work in solar energy, created the first thermoelectric power generator in 1947 and the first thermoelectric refrigerator in 1953, using the principles of semiconductor thermoelectricity.

• Maria Telkes in Women of Science composite poster
• Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women

Margaret Thatcher
b. 10-13-1925; Granthan, Lincolnshire

Margaret Thatcher was trained as a chemist and worked on the team that developed soft serve ice cream - (isn't life just too poetic?)

Chien-Shiung Wu
b. 5-29-1912; Shanghai, China
d. 2-16-1997; NYC

Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, while at Columbia University, worked on the process for enriching uranium into U-235 fissile metal for the Manhattan Project, and performed very early experiments that contradicted the hypothetical “Law of Conservation of Parity”. Her honorific nicknames included the “First Lady of Physics”, the “Chinese Marie Curie”, and “Madame Wu”.

• Chien-Shiung Wu in Women of Science composite poster
• Notable Asian-Americans posters
• Chien-Shiung Wu: Pioneering Physicist and Atomic Researcher