Ellen Swallow Richards claimed a number of ‘firsts’ in her lifetime. Not only the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was the first American woman to earn a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, and is regarded as one of the foremost environmental chemists of the 19th century.
Elsie May Widdowson pioneered important research into human and animal diets that led to the introduction of a UK healthy rationing system in WWII, alongside the compulsory addition of calcium to bread-making flour. Her research helped the readjustment of post-concentration camp starvation victims and war-torn communities, and has left a lasting legacy that continues to this day.
Dr. Wafaa El Sadr is director of both the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP), and Columbia University’s Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiologic Research. She oversees an organization spanning 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, providing crucial HIV services and antiretroviral therapy to those in need of treatment.
Dr. Patricia Bath is an internationally renowned ophthalmologist and inventor, best known for her creation of devices that painlessly treat cataracts and her advocacy of community ophthalmology outreach programmes. In her decades of bringing eye treatments to underprivileged communities, she has helped thousands worldwide to regain their vision.
Ida Henrietta Hyde was an American physiologist who is best known for inventing the intracellular microelectrode. During her early life, Ida took up the role of breadwinner in her family after the Chicago Fire of 1870 destroyed her mother’s business. It was whilst working in a clothing factory that she stumbled upon a natural science book by Alexander von Humboldt, continuing to devour more and more of the sciences during her lunch hours.
The Valentina Project 