Edith Clarke was the first woman to be awarded an electrical engineering degree from MIT, and the first woman to be professionally employed as an electrical engineer in the US. She worked on the hydroelectric systems that, to this day, provide hydropower at the West Hoover Dam.
Mary Jackson was a mathematician and aerospace engineer at NACA, later to become NASA. She was NASA's first Black female engineer. She particularly worked in understanding air flow, including thrust and drag forces—important for aircraft design.
Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. She’s famous for developing a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes in WWII. The principles of her work have been incorporated into modern Bluetooth and GPS technology.
Ayyalasomayajula Lalitha was India’s first female engineer, graduating from the College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG) in 1943. She designed substation layouts and transmission lines for India’s largest dam: the Bhakra Nangal Dam.
Lynn Conway is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist. She developed a system used by modern computer processors to improve performance, and has worked in microchip design. In 2020, IBM apologised for firing Conway in 1968 for being trans.
((un)fortunately there’s plenty of material, because English is a pain in the neck*)
(*when did it become bum/backside/arse? Surely a pain in the neck is worse…?)
allude: indirectly call attention to something (“she alluded to the events of last Friday”)
elude: escape from something (“they eluded their pursuer”)
Similar-sounding but with two different meanings. Remember to ALLude means to cALL attention.
which reminds me of…
peruse: examine carefully
pursue: chase/continue along
It only takes a small slip for autocorrect to bite you here. Imagine splitting the words –PER USE vs. PUR SUE – and remember someone might purSUE a legal claim where someone else was SUEd.
I’ve been asked to make a post about my twisty-turny career for #YoungScientistNetworking, because not all PhDs end up in academia. So, here goes… 🧵 1/8
I finished my chemistry PhD in 2000, at Nottingham University (home of @periodicvideos!). I briefly contemplated working for Bio-Rad, because I’d done a lot of infrared spec, but instead I joined UoN’s web design team (it was a pretty new thing, then) 2/8
After two years I decided I missed the science. So I left to complete a teacher-training course. I’d go on to teach secondary science, particularly chemistry, on and off for nearly twenty years 3/8
I like that fact that this article reads as incredibly biased against the pub, but even with the slantiest ever slant, literally all they’ve got is, “yeah well the bar manager has some words in their Twitter name. It’s locked now but they did. Honest.”