Women Who Changed Science Forever
Ellen Ochoa (May 10, 1958–)
Ellen Ochoa is an American engineer and retired astronaut. Born in Los Angeles, California, Ochoa was the first Latina woman to fly in space as part of the crew of the shuttle Discovery in 1993. In 1990, Ochoa was selected to astronaut candidacy as part of Group 13, a group of twenty-three NASA astronauts, and became an astronaut a year later. Her first spaceflight was aboard Discovery as a mission specialist and lasted nine days, in which the five-person crew conducted scientific experiments and deployed a research satellite to study the solar corona.
Mamie Phipps Clark (April 18, 1917–August 11, 1983)
Mamie Phipps Clark was an American social psychologist, who specialized in child development in Black children. Born in Arkansas, Clark drew on her early experiences as a black child in the segregated (种族隔离) American South to help children growing up with the same inequalities. She initiated the famous Doll Test, which showed that Black children in segregated schools were more likely to prefer dolls with white complexions and yellow hair while discarding the brown dolls with black hair and assigning negative traits to them. Her husband, Kenneth, used their research to argue for school integration in the
1954 Supreme Court Case Brown v. Board of Education. This was the first time that social science was used in a Supreme Court case.
Katsuko Saruhashi (March 22, 1920–September 29, 2007)
Geochemist Katsuko Saruhashi was born in Tokyo on 22 March,1920. She developed Saruhashi's Table, a method for measuring CO2 using pH, temperature, and chlorinity, which has become a global standard. Saruhashi broke new ground in her study of ocean-borne nuclear contamination following the nuclear weapons test the United States undertook on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Saruhashi's research played an important role in limiting nuclear proliferation (扩散) around the world, thanks to the signing of the 1963 treaty.
