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Our Science Heroes

Meet Nancy Grace Roman, the "mother" of the Hubble Space Telescope

She discovered fundamental truths about stars and galaxies, and also shaped NASA into what we know it as today

Meet Evelyn Boyd Granville, the mathematician who mass produced computers and shot Apollo into space

One of the first Black women to earn a PhD in math, she worked on seemingly every major math project of the 20th century

Meet Gerty Cori, the Nobel-winning biochemist who uncovered how the body stores and consumes sugars

Cori's work determined glycogen storage "disease" had several subtypes, each with a unique molecular cause

Meet Kathleen Lonsdale, the physicist and prison reformer who cracked benzene's code

Lonsdale assembled her own X-ray crystallography laboratory from scratch to solve a century-old mystery

Meet Virginia Apgar, the unlikely anesthesiologist who saved newborn babies

Apgar's simple, standardized score helped decrease the startlingly high infant mortality rate

Meet Merit-Ptah, the ancient Egyptian doctor who didn't exist

Though created by accident, her story fit neatly with burgeoning 20th century feminism

Meet Lynnae Quick, NASA's hunter of space cryomagma

Only the fifth African American woman with a planetary sciences PhD, she's on the team hoping to first see Europa's geysers

Meet Lady Mary Montagu, who brought smallpox inoculation to England

This poet and essayist likely saved many lives from this deadly, disfiguring disease

Meet Hertha Ayrton, the mathematician who cleared WW1 trenches of poisonous gas

Ayrton was the first woman to recieve the Hughes Medal for outstanding research in the field of energy, but still the Royal Society refused her membership

Meet Alice Wilson, the Canadian geologist who did the work of five people

She wasn't allowed to work at remote field sites, so she became the expert in her local rocks and fossils

Elizabeth Rona, the wandering polonium woman, changed radiation science forever

She survived world wars, anti-Semitism, and decades of exposure to early radiochemistry

Meet Dr. Gladys West, the hidden figure behind your phone's GPS

Gladys West is one of the reasons why you can receive driving directions from your phone or tag a photo location on Instagram