Ellen Ochoa

Ellen Ochoa is an American engineer, former director of Johnson Space Centre, and a former astronaut. She became the first Hispanic woman to travel to space in 1993. The space mission took nine days while she was on the Space Shuttle Discovery. She also became the first Hispanic director of Johnson Space Centre and the second woman to head the division between 2012 and 2018.

Kalpana Chawla

Kalpana Chawla was the first Indian woman to have been in space. She was an astronaut and engineer. She was chosen to be a part of the Space Shuttle Columbia team, which flew to space in 1997, as a robotic specialist.

Edith Clarke

Edith Clarke, born in 1883, was a distinguished American electrical engineer who was a true trailblazer in her field. Her specialty was in electrical power system analysis. She earned her electrical engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), becoming the first woman to achieve such a feat.

She set the path for women in the engineering field by being the first woman in the United States to be employed as a professional electrical engineer. Later on, at the University of Texas, she became the first female Professor of Electrical Engineering in America.

Margaret E. Knight

She is one of the most productive American inventors who became known for her inventions of machines used for various industrial purposes. Her first invention was when she was 12 years old, and her first patented work is a paper bag folding machine which was patented in 1871. She was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006. Margaret was called the ‘woman Edison’ for having 87 patents to her credit, 27 of which are well-known inventions. She invented close to hundreds of machines that are used in different industries today.

Ruth Graves Wakefield

Ruth Graves Wakefield is an American chef and the inventor of the classic favorite chocolate chip cookies which was initially called the Toll House Crunch Cookie. Wakefield was also a dietician, author, educator, and business owner. The recipe for the Toll House Cookie was imprinted at the back of the packaging of Nestle products since the year 1939.

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr was an actress, film producer and inventor of Austrian American descent. She pioneered the first version of the spread-spectrum that would form the basis of today’s communication systems like Bluetooth, WiFi, and GPS. She showed interest in acting and inventions at an incredibly young age. She co-invented the spread spectrum.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace is the world’s first computer programmer. She was the first person to write a program - a series of commands that Charles Babbage’s mechanical computer could use to do complicated calculations. Ada believed machines could do more than just math and correctly predicted many of their future uses, such as creating graphics and music.