Bayes Centre

7 Women in STEM

This International Women’s Day we would like to bring light to 7 pioneering women in STEM who changed the world through science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Despite female representation in data science, technology, AI and entrepreneurship being small, the Bayes Centre understands the proven benefits that diversity has on innovation. 

 The Bayes Centre has a great history of supporting female entrepreneurship, including keynote speakers at Engage Invest Exploit, the premier technology investor showcase, these include (amongst others) Dame Stephanie ‘Steve’ ShirleySherry CoutuEileen BurbidgeJulie MeyerLesley EcclesHeidi Roizen and Kim Polese – we’re proud that the stats suggest that female participants outperform the industry average.

Now, without further ado, the 7 women in STEM you should definitely know about: 

Katherine Johnson, NASA Space Scientist

Katherine Johnson, graduated from university at 18. Katherine Johnson was a teacher and research mathematician, co-authoring over 25 scientific papers.

She and her colleagues, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson conducted the calculations that guided NASA’s 1962 Friendship 7 Mission. Not only was she a notable woman in STEM, very rare in the 50’s, Katherine was also one of the first African American woman scientists at NASA. She received the  Presidential Medal of Freedom award in 2015 for a lifetime of work as a pioneering physicist, mathematician and space scientist.

Lady Augusta Ada Lovelace, Countess of Lovelace & Mathematician

Lady Augusta Ada Lovelace is known for her work on computers with Charles Babbage. She was the first person to recognise the technique of computing and writing programmes, effectively making her the first computer programmer.

The early programming language Ada was named after her, and the second Tuesday in October has become Ada Lovelace Day, on which the contributions of women to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are recognised.

Radia Perlman, Internet Pioneer

As an early computer scientist and student of MIT in the 60’s Radia became an internet pioneer, she developed the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), an innovation that made today’s Internet possible and she also invented TRILL to correct limitations of STP.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, Inventor & Computer Scientist

Grace Hopper was American computer scientist, and a Rear Admiral in the US Navy.  She invented the first programming language to use english words. She is also a key inventor of the language COBOL (an acronym for COmmonBusiness-OrientedLanguage) a widely used programming language.

Adriana Ocampo, Planetary Geologist

Adriana Ocampo is a planetary geologist and the Science Program Manager at NASA Headquarters. She has worked on a number of NASA planetary science projects, including the Juno mission to Jupiter and the New Horizons mission to Pluto. She  was named one of the 50 Most Important Women in Science.

Roberta Bondar, Astronaut Neurologist

Roberta is Canada’s first female astronaut and the world’s first astronaut-neurologist. Roberta Bondar has received over 22 honorary degrees, and induction into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

After her career as an astronaut she spent the next decade leading an international research team at NASA to study the effects on astronauts of spaceflight and re-adaptation back to Earth’s gravity

Ginni Rometty, CEO IBM

Ginni Rometty was an early compscience graduate in the 70’s. Rometty joined IBM as a systems engineer. She became SVP Marketing & Strategy in 2009, she then led IBM into cloud computing, analytics, and the commercialisation of IBM Watson. She has been IBM’s CEO since 2012.