Women in chemistry

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]

Marie Curie

• 2009 – Ada E. Yonath - structure & function of the ribosome
• 1964 – Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin - protein crystallography
• 1935 – Irène Joliot-Curie - artificial radioactivity
• 1911 – Marie Sklodowska-Curie - discovery of radium & polonium

Four 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.

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

• 2015 - Xie Yi (Asia-Pacific) - inorganic chemistry
• 2015 - Molly S. Shoichet (North America) - photochemistry
• 2011 - Faiza Al-Harafi (Africa/Arab States) - electrochemistry

List of Women Chemists

19th Century

• Vera Bogdanovskaia (1868-1897), one of the first female Russian chemists
• 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, & 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
• Ellen Swallow Richards (1842–1911), American industrial and environmental chemist
• Anna Volkova (1800–1876), Russian chemist
• Nadezhda Olimpievna Ziber-Shumova (d. 1914), Russian chemist

20th Century

• Barbara Askins (1939-), American chemist
• Alice Ball (1892-1916), American chemist
• Astrid Cleve (1875–1968), Swedish chemist
• Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934), Polish-French chemist (pioneer in radiology, discovery of polonium and radium), Nobel prize in physics 1903 and Nobel prize in chemistry 1911
• Gertrude B. Elion (1918–1999), American biochemist (Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine 1988 for drug development)
• Rosalind Franklin (1920–1957), British physical chemist and crystallographer
• Ellen Gleditsch (1879–1968), Norwegian radiochemist
• Anna J. Harrison (1912–1998), American organic chemist
• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994), British crystallographer, Nobel prize in chemistry 1964
• Clara Immerwahr (1870–1915), German chemist
• Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956), French chemist and nuclear physicist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1935
• Stephanie Kwolek (1923–), American chemist, inventor of Kevlar
• Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971), British crystallographer
• Elizabeth Moran (? - ), British chemist and public analyst
• Maud Menten (1879–1960), Canadian biochemist
• Eva Philbin (1914–2005), Irish chemist
• Darshan Ranganathan (1941-2001), Indian organic chemist
• Mildred Rebstock (1919-2011), American pharmaceutical chemist
• Sibyl Martha Rock (1909 – 1981), American pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing
• Elizabeth Rona (1890 - 1981), Hungarian (naturalized American) nuclear chemist and polonium expert
• Patsy Sherman (1930-2008), American chemist, co-inventor of Scotchgard
• Margaret Stanley, British virologist
• Ida Noddack Tacke (1896–1978), German chemist and physicist
• Jean Thomas, British biochemist (chromatin)
• Jean Youatt - Australian chemist, biochemist, microbiologist
• Ada Yonath (1939–), Israeli crystallographer, Nobel prize in Chemistry 2009
• Glaci Zancan (1935-2007), Brazilian biochemist, president of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of the Science (SBPC) from 1999-2003

References