Ellen Ochoa Jedidah Isler Annie Jump CannonReceived her B.S. inPhysics from San DiegoState University, and herM.S. and Ph.D. in ElectricalEngineering from Stanford University. In 1993, aboard the space shuttle Discovery, she became the first Hispanic woman in the worldto go to space. She is currently the Director of the Johnson Space Center.

Received her B.S. at NorfolkState University. In 2014 shereceived her Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Yale, becoming the first African American woman to do so. She did her research on hypermassive black holes.She is currently working onthe physics of particle jets being emitted by black holes in distant galaxies.

She enrolled at Radcliffe College, near Harvard College, which gave heraccess to the Harvard College Observatory. In 1896,she was hired by Edward C. Pickering as an assistant at the observatory. She is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme for stars, which is still in use today.

Chien-Shiung Wu (吳健雄) Jocelyn Bell Burnell Ginger KerrickBorn in Jiangsu province in China, she did her undergraduate work there before immigrating to the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in 1940, studying beta decay at UC Berkeley.She became involved in the Manhattan Project atColumbia University, where she remained as a professorfor the rest of her career.

Graduated from Universityof Glascow with a B.S. in Natural Philosophy and attained her Ph.D. fromUniversity of Cambridge in1969. She detected the firstdiscovered pulsar using a four acre radio telescopethat she helped build. The 1974 Nobel Prize was awarded for her discovery, but not to her.

Attended University of Texasat El Paso, and graduatedfrom Texas Tech with a B.S.in Physics. She wanted to be an astronaut, but could not join the program due to medical issues. In 2001, sheinstead became the first non-astronaut CapCom. In 2005, she became the first Hispanic NASA flight director.

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Photo:NASA Photo:StephenSartori Photo:Hulton Archive/GettyImages

Photo:SmithsonianInstitution Photo:RogerW.Haworth Photo:NASA

Jane X. Luu (Lưu LệHằng) Henrietta Swan Leavitt Shirley Ann JacksonBorn in South Vietnam, sheimmigrated to the UnitedStates as a refugee in1975. She earned her degree in physics fromStanford University andreceived her Ph.D. fromMassachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. As a graduate student at MITand UC Berkeley, she co-discovered the Kuiper Belt.

In 1893, she began working at the Harvard College Observatory. She studied variable stars, and discovered the period-luminosity relationship ofCepheid variable stars.The Cepheid variable stars became the first “standard candles,” which allowed astronomers to compute very great distances.

Receiving her Ph.D. in nuclear physics working on elementary particletheory at MIT in 1973, she became the first African American woman to earnher doctorate there. Shewas also the first womanand first African Americanto serve as Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Katherine Johnson Priyamvada Natarajan Vera RubinA high school graduate at14 and a college graduateat 18, she worked as a “computer” for NACA during World War II. After the war, she continuedworking for the organization now known as NASA, calculating trajectories forthe astronauts includingAlan Shepard, the first American in Space.

Born in India she grew up inDelhi. She received undergraduate degrees in physics and math from MIT, and did her graduate work at Cambridge. She currentlyworks as a professor atYale. Her research involvescosmology and mapping the distribution of dark matter in the universe using gravitational lensing.

She earned her B.A. in astronomy from Vassar College, her Master’s atCornell, and her Ph.D. at Georgetown University. She pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates and showed that galaxies must have a lot of unseenmass keeping them from flying apart, leading to the theory of dark matter.

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Photo:Kavli Foundation Photo:AmericanInstituteof Physics Photo:RensselaerPolytechnicInstitute

Photo:AstronomicalSocietyof thePacif icPhoto:Departmentof Astronomy,YalePhoto:NASA