Women in chemistry

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a list of women chemists. It should include those who have been important to the development or practice of chemistry. Their research or application has made significant contributions in the area of basic or applied chemistry.

Nobel Laureates[1][]

Seven women have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (listed above), awarded annually since 1901 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Marie Curie was the first woman to receive the prize in 1911, which was her second Nobel Prize (she also won the prize in physics in 1903, along with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel – making her the only woman to be award two Nobel prizes). Her prize in chemistry was for her "discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element." Irene Joliot-Curie, Marie's daughter, became the second woman to be awarded this prize in 1935 for her discovery of artificial radioactivity. Dorothy Hodgkin won the prize in 1964 for the development of protein crystallography. Among her significant discoveries are the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12. Forty five years later, Ada Yonath shared the prize with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz for the study of the structure and function of the ribosome. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A Doudna won the 2020 prize in chemistry “for the development of a method for genome editing.”[2] Charpentier and Doudna are the first women to share the Nobel Prize in chemistry.[3]

L'Oreal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science Laureates (Chemistry)[]

List of women chemists[]

19th century[]

  • Mary Watson (1856–1933), one of the first two female chemistry students at the University of Oxford
  • Margaret Seward (1864–1929), one of the first two female chemistry students at the University of Oxford; signed the 1904 petition to the Chemical Society
  • Vera Bogdanovskaia (1868–1897), one of the first female Russian chemists
  • Gerty Cori (1896–1957) Jewish Czech-American biochemist who was the first American to win a Nobel Prize in science
  • Ida Freund (1863–1914), first woman to be a university chemistry lecturer in the United Kingdom
  • Louise Hammarström (1849–1917), Swedish mineral chemist, first formally trained female Swedish chemist
  • Edith Humphrey (1875–1978), inorganic chemist, probably the first British woman to gain a doctorate in chemistry
  • Julia Lermontova (1846–1919), Russian chemist, first Russian female doctorate in chemistry
  • Laura Linton (1853–1915), American chemist, teacher, and physician
  • Rachel Lloyd (1839–1900), first American female to earn a doctorate in chemistry, first regularly admitted female member of the American Chemical Society, studied sugar beets
  • Muriel Wheldale Onslow (1880–1932), British biochemist
  • Marie Pasteur (1826–1910), French chemist and bacteriologist
  • Mary Engle Pennington (1872–1952), American chemist
  • Agnes Pockels (1862–1935), German chemist
  • Vera Popova (1867–1896), Russian chemist
  • Anna Sundström (1785–1871), Swedish chemist
  • Clara Immerwahr (1870–1915), the first woman to get her doctorate in chemistry in Germany
  • Ellen Swallow Richards (1842–1911), American industrial and environmental chemist
  • Anna Volkova (1800–1876), Russian chemist
  • Nadezhda Olimpievna Ziber-Shumova (died 1914), Russian chemist
  • Fanny Rysan Mulford Hitchcock (1851–1936), one of thirteen women to graduate with a degree in chemistry in the 1800s, and the first to graduate with a doctorate in philosophy of chemistry. Her areas of focus were in entomology, fish osteology, and plant pathology.[4]

20th century[]

21st century[]

  • Emily Balskus (born 1980), American organic chemist and microbiologist
  • Paula T. Hammond[5](born 1963), American chemical engineer, MIT professor
  • Jeanne Hardy, American biophysicist and chemical biologist
  • Geraldine Harriman, American executive and medicinal chemist
  • Rachel Haurwitz (born 1985), American biochemist and structural biologist
  • Katja Loos (born 1971), German polymer chemist working at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands
  • Lisa Marcaurelle, American synthetic chemist in industry
  • Catherine J. Murphy, American chemist
  • Sarah O'Connor, American plant synthetic biologist working in England
  • Sarah E Reisman (born 1979), American organic chemist
  • Seble Wagaw, American process chemist and pharma exec
  • Marcey Lynn Waters, American chemical biologist and supramolecular chemist
  • Jenny Y Yang, American chemist and clean energy researcher at UCI
  • Wendy Young, American chemist at Genentech

References[]

  1. ^ "Nobel Prize Awarded Women". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-04-18.
  2. ^ "2020 Nobel Prizes Honor Three Women in Science". AIP Publishing LLC. Retrieved 2021-07-01.
  3. ^ "Two women share chemistry Nobel in historic win for 'genetic scissors'". BBC News. 2020-10-07. Retrieved 2021-07-01.
  4. ^ Creese, Mary (1998). Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800-1900: A Survey of their Research (1st ed.). Lanham, MD & London: The Scarecrow Press. p. 256. ISBN 0810832879.
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b "The Hammond Lab – Engineering Multifunctional Polymeric Materials". Retrieved 2021-01-06.
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