“If women and girls don’t see themselves on screen as STEM professionals, they’re less likely to pursue those career paths.”
-Geena Davis
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Here's the latest on the Women in STEM.
‘We Really Cannot Lose a Day’: Two Female Scientists Racing to Find a COVID-19 Vaccine
It’s become a somewhat dispiriting refrain in the time of COVID-19: Life won’t go back to any semblance of normal until there is a vaccine. The global pandemic has sparked a global race for a vaccine under unprecedented pressure: According to the World Health Organization, nearly 70 potential vaccines are currently in development by scientists and researchers worldwide. At least three are already in human trials, and one created at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute has proven effective on a small sample of rhesus monkeys. Read More…
Overlooked No More: June Almeida, Scientist Who Identified the First Coronavirus
With no money to pay for college in post-World War II Scotland, 16-year-old June Almeida took an entry-level job in the histology department of a Glasgow hospital, where she learned to examine tissue under a microscope for signs of disease. It was a fortuitous move, for her and for science. In 1966, nearly two decades later, she used a powerful electron microscope to capture an image of a mysterious pathogen — the first coronavirus known to cause human disease. Read More…
The Leader We Wish We All Had
The coronavirus has turned several public health officials and local leaders into bona fide celebrities, and perhaps no one is more compelling than the Ohio Health Department’s Dr. Amy Acton. She wasn’t just the brains behind the state’s early, aggressive coronavirus response; she was also its most effective messenger. In the video above, we deconstructed Dr. Acton’s daily briefings to find out why this previously unknown public health official now has her own Facebook fan club, T-shirts, chalk drawings and ’70s sitcom parodies. Read More…
Meet Sarah Gilbert, the female scientist leading Oxford vaccine team – and about to make history
In the days before coronavirus (remember those?) it was celebrities and influencers who dominated the limelight. But these are strange times we live in. As we sit cooped up in our homes for the fifth week in a row, it is those in the science community that are emerging as the public’s humble heroes. And I would defy anyone not to be impressed by Professor Sarah Gilbert, the latest brains to emerge from the pandemic and, arguably, one of the most important. Prof Gilbert is the woman at the forefront of the race to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, leading a team of dedicated researchers from the Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group. Read More…
City of Science: Here are some of our unsung female science heroes
We now know there have been many female scientists written out of history, whether purposefully by male colleagues taking credit for their work, or ‘accidentally’ by a field that didn’t value their discoveries or contributions. It got us thinking about other unsung science heroes; women whose work and discoveries have shaped the fields of medicine, genetics, physics and more. Glasgow Science Centre’s team told us about some of the female scientists who inspire them and who deserve more recognition. Read More…
Lee-En Chung: Award Winning Engineer
Lee-En Chung, part of SRQ Media’s Women in Business Initiative and a member of our Class of 2014 Leadership Circle, was recently awarded the prestigious Engineer of the Year award at the 3rd Annual SunCoast Engineers Award Banquet. Christopher Sharek, President of the Florida ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers), shared that the banquet helped to highlight, “the people that design, construct, and maintain the built infrastructure of our community.” During the nationally recognized event for engineers, local Sarasotans arrived in record attendance at Mote Marine. The night was a “magical merge of different types of science,” Chung noted as they celebrated their engineering accomplishments seated next to Mote’s shark tanks. Read More…
The Female Doctors Who Fought to Serve in World War I
A riddle from my childhood goes like this: A father and son are injured in a serious car accident, and each is taken to a different hospital. As the boy is being prepped for surgery, the surgeon rushes in and exclaims in horror: “I can’t operate! He’s my son.” How is this possible? That the ludicrously obvious answer — the surgeon is a woman — eluded every member of my family except me, a 12-year-old girl, in 1975, makes the subject and the chronology of Wendy Moore’s new book all the more thrilling. Read More…
These Aspiring Female Scientists in Afghanistan Designed a Cheap Ventilator to Treat COVID-19
A group of teen girls in Herat, Afghanistan is working hard to design an affordable ventilator to treat COVID-19 coronavirus patients. The Afghan Girls Robotics Team of five girls aged 14 to 17 — Somaya Faruqi, Dyana Wahbzadeh, Folernace Poya, Ellaham Mansori, and Nahid Rahimi — are part of the Afghan Dreamers two-year program for high-achieving girls. Their city has seen a spike in COVID-19 coronavirus cases as thousands of people fled Iran to escape a massive outbreak. More than 800 confirmed coronavirus cases have been reported in Afghanistan and the country of 35 million people had only 300 ventilators as of Thursday. Read More…
Is fungus the answer to climate change? Student who grew a mushroom canoe says yes.
Catch a glimpse of Katy Ayers paddling her canoe on a Nebraska lake this summer and you might do a double take. At first glance, her 8-foot vessel looks much like any other canoe — same oblong shape, same pointed ends, same ability to float on water. But upon closer inspection, it’s clearly anything but ordinary: Ayers’ canoe is made out of mushrooms. More specifically, her boat is made from mycelium, the dense, fibrous roots of the mushroom that typically live beneath the soil. Ayers, 28, a student at Central Community College in Columbus, Nebraska, even gave her creation a fitting name: “Myconoe.” Read More…
Meet the ‘Outstanding’ 34-Year-Old Scientist Leading the Charge on Coronavirus Vaccine Trials
As coronavirus continues to spread throughout the United States, a group of scientists led by Kizzmekia Corbett is working around the clock toward developing a life-saving vaccine. Corbett, 34, is a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where she and her team have already begun first-stage clinical trials of a vaccine to fight against COVID-19, according to The New York Times. Read More…
