Timeline of women in science in the United States

This is a timeline of women in science in the United States.

• 1848: Maria Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she had discovered a new comet the year before.^[1]
• 1894: Florence Bascom became the first female fellow of the Geological Society of America.^[2]
• 1912: Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied the bright-dim cycle periods of Cepheid stars, then found a way to calculate the distance from such stars to Earth.^[3]
• 1925: Florence Sabin became the first woman elected to the National Academy of Science.^[4]
• 1928: Alice Evans became the first woman elected president of the Society of American Bacteriologists.^[2]
• 1936: Edith Patch became the first female president of the Entomological Society of America.^[5]
• 1940s: Barbara McClintock discovered genetic transposition.^[6]
• 1950: Esther Lederberg was the first to isolate lambda bacteriophage, a DNA virus, from Escherichia coli K-12.^[7]
• 1952: Grace Hopper completed what is considered to be the first compiler, a program that allows a computer user to use English-like words instead of numbers. It was known as the A-0 compiler.^[8]
• 1963: Maria Goeppert Mayer became the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics; she shared the prize with Eugene Paul Wigner and J. Hans D. Jensen.^[9][10] She was born in Poland, but became a U.S. citizen in 1933.^[10][11]
• 1975: Chien-Shiung Wu, born in China, became the first female president of the American Physical Society.^[12]
• 1976: Margaret Burbidge, born in England, was named as the first female president of the American Astronomical Society.^[13][14]
• 1978: Anna Jane Harrison became the first female president of the American Chemical Society.^[15]
• 1984: Carol W. Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn (Blackburn was born in Australia) discovered telomerase, an enzyme that maintains telomeres, or chromosome ends.^[16][17]
• 1992: Edith M. Flanigen became the first woman awarded the Perkin Medal (widely considered the highest honor in American industrial chemistry) for her outstanding achievements in applied chemistry.^[18][19] The medal especially recognized her syntheses of aluminophosphate and silicoaluminophosphate molecular sieves as new classes of materials.^[19]
• 2004: Lucy Sanders (1954-) co-founded the National Center for Women & Information Technology ^[20]
• 2012: Clara Lazen, then a fifth grader, discovered the molecule tetranitratoxycarbon.^[21]

References