Simone Peterson Hruda: Reflections on Black Women in Engineering

This past March Rutgers University hosted the Black Women Academics in the Ivory Tower Conference. Dr. Simone Peterson Hruda, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Florida A&M and Florida State gave a lecture on "Reflections on black women in engineering":



Some of the issues Hruda talks about:

• Of 65,000 bachelors degrees awarded in engineering, 3000 are to black students, and only 1000 or 1.6% go to black women students. Only 0.4% of engineering PhDs are awarded to black women.
  
• She points out that she is only one of about 350 black women who have gotten PhDs in engineering in the US, which is fewer than the number of engineering schools.
  
• When she was a graduate student, the white women students were upset that there weren't more women role models on the faculty. She didn't have the same expectation to find black women role models or mentors because she went in knowing there wouldn't be any.
  
• She has found that there are graduate students who prefer not to work for black women professors.

And there's a lot more about mentoring and teaching and how engineering is for anyone who is curious about how things work.

The Q & A session after the lecture:




Watch video of all the presentations and panel discussions on YouTube.

(via Prometheus 6)

Tags: women in engineering, black women in engineering, Simone Peterson Hruda

Women of the Apollo Program

Last month was the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's historic moon landing. Watching the footage of of the landing makes it look like the Apollo program was men-only. But it was more complicated than that.

As Echidne points out:

But the absence of women astronauts in the program has a much more concrete reason: They were excluded from it. Books have been written about that: Margaret A. Weitekamp's Right Stuff, Wrong Sex and Stephanie Nolen's Promised The Moon.

And there were women involved with the project itself as described by Robyn C. Friend in The Women of Apollo. You can hear one of the original engineers, Ann Dixon[sic], speak about her experiences here:

Ann Dickson says she was "convinced that someday she was going to be an astronaut." Unfortunately that didn't happen, in part because she didn't have 600 hours of flying time.*

Ann Dixon wasn't alone in the Apollo program as this 1969 AP article explains:

Frances "Poppy" Northcutt, for example, is a 25-year-old Dayton, Tex., native who is a member of the flight dynamics support staff in mission control at the Manned Spacecraft Center. The tall, blonde mathematician is one of the first women to serve in an operational support role in mission control.
"There's less discrimination against women here than in any of the professional areas," she said.

The article goes on to mention Larue Burbank, designer of the visual displays used for real-time monitoring of spacecraft, and Dorothy Lee, an engineer who worked on the re-entry heat shields.

In a 1999 interview, Lee recalled being recruited by NASA (pdf):

... math was very easy for me just happened to be the easiest subject, and that's the reason I majored in math. Then when we were recruited - I say "we." There were several girls - I was from Randlph-Macon [Woman’s College, Lynchburg, Virginia]—who went to work for NACA at Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia], and again I was put in the best division there. It was called PARD, Pilotless Aircraft Research Division. We had the exciting opportunities to launch vehicles, to test different configurations, and how those configurations would [ultimately design] spacecraft by virtue of the shape of the nose. We went from cones to blunt bodies. You see today your different vehicles are all blunt bodies. So I was right there and enjoyed it. It was fun.
[. . .]
Of course, today, NASA recruits all over the country, but back in 1948, which is when I graduated from college, and there were not many gals, we were hired as "computers." Computers didn't exist, you understand. We had calculators. They gave us civil service exams, and I was fortunate enough to pass the exam at a couple of grades higher than I was hired in, so I got raises.

But the thing that I would like to tell has something to do with Dr. [Maxime A.] Faget. Working as a computer, [later] we were classified as mathematicians. One day my project was to solve a triple integral for an engineer, so it didn't require using my calculator. I could just do it at my desk. Max's secretary was going to get married, and so I was asked to be his secretary for two weeks while she was on her honeymoon. [. . .] I would answer the phone, distribute the mail, and work my triple integral. I did this for two weeks. [. . .]
This Friday, the end of my two weeks, Max said, "Dottie, how would you like to work for me all the time?"
I thought he was being funny, because I don't type, and I knew that this was the last day and Shirley was returning Monday. I said, "Sure," in a very flip way. He gets up, goes downstairs to talk to the division chief, and he returns and he says, "Dottie, you start working for me Monday."
Well, I looked at him like, "All right," you know. So they found me a desk, and I was put with some engineers who were beautiful and taught me how to be an engineer. I learned on the job.

But not surprisingly, it was tall blonde Poppy Northcutt** who got attention in the press, particularly when she turned out to be the only woman working at Mission Control during the Apollo 13 emergency. And also, not too surprisingly, the article uses almost as many column inches asking her social life as it does talking about her work with the Apollo computer systems .

So yes, there were indeed a number of women mathematicians and engineers who played important roles in the Apollo program, even if they weren't astronauts.

That doesn't mean that they earned everyone's respect, of course. See, for example, this 1987 article in Popular Mechanics about the Space Shuttle program in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster in which retired Mercury and Apollo 7 astronaut Wally Schirra complains about women scientists and non-test pilots in the program (who he seems to equate with engineers):

To get ready for a serious relaunch, NASA will have to go back to using qualified test pilots only for the foreseeable future. It is ludicrous at this early stage of space exploration to allow a virtual passenger on the Shuttle to become known as an "astronaut." Such people have little to offer at an engineering skull session. I was appalled to see young women scientists in mission control acting as liaison with the Shuttle mission commander. This is not a job for a "show-and-tell" celebrity.

After that gratuitous swipe at women scientists (gratuitous because it's unlikely that the men scientists in mission control were pilots either), Shirra goes on to explain how Sally Ride is totally NOT an "engineering test pilot", so she should totally stop talking about "flying" the Space Shuttle.

But now, 40 years after Apollo 11, there are indeed women test pilot-astronauts, such as Eileen Collins, Pamela Melroy, and Susan Still Kilrain, along with many scientist and engineer-mission specialists like Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, Karen Nyberg, Megan McArthur, Julie Payette, Stephanie Wilson, Joan Higginbotham, Kalpana Chawla (killed on Columbia), Sandra Magus, and many many others.

Now if only we'd finally return to the Moon, or head out to Mars . . .

Further reading and watching :

• Watch more Women of Apollo-related videos
• NASA Oral History: Dorothy B. Lee, engineer (pdf)
• NASA Oral History: Jeanne L. Crews, aeronautical engineer (pdf)
• Society of Women Engineers Oral History: Ivy Hooks, aerospace engineer
• Houston Public Library Oral History: Francis Miriam "Poppy" Northcutt, "computeress"
  
• Official Site: The Women of Apollo
• Historiann "Feminism and whig history" (via Academic Ecology)
• Paul Campos "And the stars look very different today" (be sure to read the comments)

* In looking for info about women in aviation I learned that in 1979 (10 years after Apollo 11) only 110 of 45,000 airline pilots were women. Even women who might otherwise be qualified for the astronaut program would likely have a hard time getting enough hours in the air to qualify.

** And cutely they named "Crater Poppy" on the moon after her. Later Northcutt entered politics, helping organize the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston (watch the excellent Sisters of '77 documentary to get a sense of the historical importance of that event), and got her law degree.

Photo: "In 1959, Langley [Research Center] employed six women who were classified by NASA as "scientists." During the Apollo era, women made up 3 to 5 percent of the professional work force agency-wide. The percentage of African American professionals was significantly smaller, from 1.5 to 3 percent. These percentages rose slowly for both groups as the decade proceeded". Source: NASA

Tags: Women of Apollo, women astronauts, women in engineering

Encouraging the Participation of Female Students in STEM fields - the Congressional Hearings

Yesterday the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education held hearings on encouraging the interest of girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in primary and secondary schools. The subcommittee Chairman Daniel Lipinski noted that skilled scientists and engineers play an important role in keeping the United States competitive for the 21st century:

We have heard time and time again that, as a nation, we are not producing enough scientists and engineers for the increasing number of technical jobs of the future. We need to make sure that we have the scientific and technical workforce we need if we are to remain a leader in the global economy, and it is not possible to do this without developing and encouraging all the talent in our nation. We must have women engineers, computer scientists, and physicists. By broadening the STEM pipeline to include more women and other under-represented groups, we can strengthen our workforce.

Some of the testimony highlights:

Dr. Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) testified that K-12 science education standards are too low for all students and expectations are low for students from groups that are underrepresented in STEM fields. He also pointed out that the is a wide difference in percentage of women participating in different fields of science and engineering, and notes that the participation of women drops significantly at the faculty level.

Although the story of women in STEM fields is one of tremendous gains over the past 40 years, it is a bittersweet story that is coupled with uneven progress and sometimes loss of ground—a discipline-specific program here, a department there, but seldom an institution-wide effort

But he didn't just point out the problems - he discussed a number of AAAS programs and made some suggestions for what the federal could do:

Many researchers and program managers believe that STEM fields are not being “marketed” appropriately to girls and young women. While President Obama has articulated specific challenges where science and engineering must play a role, it is also important to provide materials (and opportunities for engagement) that demonstrate how STEM connects to addressing the real world problems we face as a nation and as a world. Consider, for example, the areas of engineering where the distribution of bachelor’s degrees in environmental and biomedical engineering awarded to women approaches that of men.

Many believe that a new call to serve for both young men and young women needs to link the critical role of education in STEM fields with the opportunity to address global concerns such as food security, clean water, climate change, clean sources of energy, and infectious diseases and other health issues. Students need examples of people who are doing this work today as well as access to opportunities for experiential learning. It is important in such efforts to prominently include women as well as men.

The "marketing" of science can be a controversial issue*, since it conjures up images of tricky advertising tactics that value "sales" more than accuracy. It's not clear to me that the gendered assumption that girls and women would be more interested in science if they understood it's role in taking care of people and the planet is an accurate one. It certainly doesn't explain why women who are interested enough in science to obtain their Ph.D.s seem to be dropping out of academia.

---

Next up was Dr. Marcia Brumit Kropf, COO of Girls Incorporated**. In her testimony, Kropf points out that the gap between girls and boys in math and physical sciences has closed significantly over the past 30 years. Her suggestion (and the approach of Girls Incorporated) is informal science education:

Girls Inc. Eureka! is a four-week summer STEM and sports camp program for girls 12-15 held on a college campus. In Alameda County, CA, girls in Eureka!, who were predominantly urban, minority girls, increased their math course-taking plans, while control group girls’ plans to take math decreased. Second-year Eureka! girls’ math and science course‐taking plans almost doubled. Their interest in science careers increased, and the percentage of girls whose wish for the following school year was “to do well/be on the honor roll,” increased from 38 percent to 66 percent.

Alarmingly, however, this study also seemed to indicate that being away from school had a positive impact on girls—both Eureka! and control girls—in terms of wanting to do math and science. For most, being back in school tended to decrease that interest.

Part of the problem is, not surprisingly, sexism:

Girls Inc. sponsors eight FIRST Robotics Lego League teams, with support from Motorola. The Girls Inc. teams often find themselves the only all-girl teams in the competitions (except of course when there are teams sponsored by the Girl Scouts). But on the co-ed teams, staff observed that it was always the boys who were operating the robots. In fact, on one occasion when I had the pleasure of speaking with some members of Robot Chicks Union, a group of female FIRST Robotics competitors, they complained that on co-ed teams they were actually assigned roles such as marketing and bringing the snacks for their team. This phenomenon plays out in classrooms as well, where girls are too often relegated to supporting roles, such as recording notes, as they watch boys perform the experiments and work with equipment.

I don't think it's surprising that girls with such experiences wouldn't end up being particularly interested in pursuing science as a career.

---

The testimony continued with Dr. Sandra Hanson, Professor of Sociology at The Catholic University of America whose most recent book is Swimming Against the Tide: African American Girls and Science Education. She testified that her research has shown that girls start out with similar interest and abilities in science as boys, but as they get older - especially during the high school years - enrollment of girls in STEM classes drops and their attitude towards science becomes more negative. Girls do better in single-sex classrooms, it turns out, and she agreed with Dr. Kropf as to the value of out-of-school informal science learning experiences. She recommended the use of the National Center for Education Research's practice guide "Encouraging Girls in Math and Science" in developing classroom programs.

Hanson also pointed out that STEM isn't just a male culture, but a predominantly white male culture, and that girls and women of different races and ethnic backgrounds can have very different experiences pursuing science and mathematics.

---

Barbara Bogue is director of the Penn State Women in Engineering Program and co-founder and co-director of the Society of Women Engineers' Assessing Women and Men in Engineering Project (SWE-AWE). She pointed out in her testimony that science and engineering have different challenges. There is also a lot of variation in the representation of women in engineering from field to field.

For example, 2006 National Science Foundation (NSF) statistics show that women received almost 50 percent of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2005- 06.

Taken on face value, these statistics make it look like there is no problem. If we break out engineering, however, the percentage of women receiving degrees is a very low 18 percent. And even within engineering, there are great variations. Environmental, bio and chemical engineering—all fields related to biological sciences—have high percentages of women at 40 percent, 37 percent and 34 percent respectively. Unfortunately, these are relatively small disciplines in terms of numbers enrolled. Mechanical and electrical engineering, on the other hand, are disciplines that traditionally have the largest populations of students, but have very low percentages of women at 11 percent and 12 percent respectively. Computer engineering, another field critical to national competitiveness, has only 11 percent.

She notes that differences between fields need to be taken into account when developing programs to attract women to those fields.

One of the findings of the SWE AWE is that women do not pursue engineering because they are turned off by the culture of engineering education, not because they lack interest or talent.

Much research shares common findings that women who are equally prepared academically as men when they enter engineering leave engineering or science with higher GPAs than their male counterparts who leave, having found less of a sense of community and citing that they have encountered poor teaching. Surveys of students leaving engineering or science, including surveys developed and implemented by SWE AWE, find that students who leave are less involved in discipline-related activities and fail to develop a sense of community.

AWE results and other findings belie the postulation that women do not pursue engineering because they are just not interested or don’t have the talent. Rather, they indicate that women who have the talent and interest are being turned off by how the discipline is presented. Women’s high school preparation and GPAs once in college are comparable to men’s. In fact, in our recent research females show significantly higher intentions to persist in engineering than their male counterparts. These results show that we don’t need to fix the women; we need to fix environments in which they fail to thrive.

Increasing the participation of women in engineering fields will require changes in the education system to make it more welcoming - or at least less off-putting.

---

Finally, Cherryl T. Thomas, president and founder of engineering consulting firm Ardmore Associates, spoke about her own path to a career in science and engineering. Unlike most of the other witnesses, she hasn't studied women in STEM, rather she based her suggestions on her own experiences starting out as one of the few women working for the City of Chicago's Department of Water and Sewers in the early 1970s.

---

Read all the hearing witness statements, which have attached statistics and citations to support their discussions.

Watch the hearings (requires Real Player)

* see, for example, the discussion of the proposed selling of science to the public in Unscientific America (which I blogged about elsewhere)

** Girls Incorporated has published fact sheets on "Girls and Science, Math, and Engineering" (pdf) and "Girls and Information Technology" (pdf), among other topics.

(via Fairer Science)

Image (left to right): Alan Leshner, Marcia Brumit Kropf, Sandra Hanson, Barbara Bogue, Cherryl Thomas.

Tags: women in science, women in engineering, education

L'Oreal-UNESCO USA Fellowships Awarded

The five postdoctoral researchers who were awarded 2009 L'Oreal USA Fellowships for Women in Science were honored at a special ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History on Thursday. Each of the winners will receive a $60,000 grant for scientific research and career development. The awardees:

Dr. Beena Kalisky: Kalisky is a postdoc in the lab of Kathyrn A. Moler in the Department of Applied Stanford University. According to the press release, she is "developing a new system for detection and characterization of individual nanomagnets. The instrument designed will scan over a large number of particles and individually measure their magnetic properties. This will help in the gathering of pertinent information for the exploration of the nanomagnets' possible applications."

Dr. Aster Kammrath: Kammrath is a postdoc in the lab of Frank Keutsch in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. According to the press release her research focuses on "the pathways by which molecules emitted by human activity or natural sources are involved in climate change and pollution problems. This work aims to help set appropriate emissions controls to minimize the production of carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases and aerosol, which could help reduce respiratory problems."

Kammrath has said that it was her mother who helped her discover science:

"She instilled in me a passion for solving problems and understanding the real-world application of the scientific method," she says.

Dr. Nozomi Nishimura: Nishimura is a postdoc in the lab of Chris B. Schaffer in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University. Her research involves "testing the role that blood vessel dysfunction plays in triggering Alzheimer's disease. This research will look at how clots or bleeds in the smallest blood vessels in the brain could seed the accumulation of A-beta proteins, an indication of plaque in the brain which often occurs in Alzheimer's patients."

Dr. Tiffany Santos: Santos is a postdoc in the Electronic & Magnetic Materials & Devices division of the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Her research involves "a class of materials called transition metal oxides, with a wide array of properties, that have numerous potential applications. This research aims to uncover new materials, which could potentially help reduce power consumption and increase the energy efficiency of information technologies, such as data storage devices and memory chips."

Dr. Erika Sudderth: Sudderth is a postdoc in the lab of David Ackerly in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California at Berkeley (the press release says Brown University, so she may have recently moved). Her research is focused on understanding "the constraints, thresholds and limits of ecological responses to precipitation, which is arguably the most important controller of ecosystem processes. This research aims to understand the mechanisms driving ecosystem responses to climate change."

(I plan to update the post as the various institutions release additional information)

For more information about the awards, see:

• L'Oréal-USA For Women in Science Official Web Site (requires Flash)
• L'Oréal USA For Women in Science on Facebook

Tags: women in science, L'Oreal-UNESCO Fellowships

Women Scientists and Engineers on NOVA's scienceNOW

PBS has just made a bunch of their programs available online, including their science news show, NOVA scienceNOW. Each episode includes a profile of a scientist or engineer doing interesting research.

The segments are short and full of human interest, with "how we met" bits from the spouse, and emphasis on hobbies. There's some science too, of course, but the overall tone is light and breezy. The take home message is science is cool and so are scientists, which isn't a bad thing at all.

The women profiled in the full online episodes are:

Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Director of the Robotic Life Group at the MIT Media Lab.

"A daring engineer designs robots to communicate and interact the way people do.

Watch the complete episode with the segment on Breazeal. Read the program's transcript.

More information:

• Cynthia Breazeal's scienceNOW page, where she answers viewer questions.
• Cynthia Breazeal's Website
• Cynthia Breazeal at the MIT Media Lab
  

Edith Widder, marine biologist and bioluminescence specialist, deep-sea explorer and founder of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association.

"Meet a marine biologist and explorer who has engineered new ways to spy on deep-sea creatures."

Watch the complete episode with the segment on Widder. Read the transcript.

More information:

• Edie Widder's scienceNOW profile, where she answers questions
  
• Edith Widder at ORCA: Ocean Research & Conservation Association
  

Other ScienceNOW segments are available online too, but only as Quicktime movies:

Yoky Matsuoka, neuroboticist (robotics + neuroscience) at the University of Washington.
Profile page (with video). Transcript.

Pardis Sabeti, Harvard geneticist and genomics expert.
Profile page (with video). Transcript

Bonnie Basler, Princeton biologist who studies how bacteria "talk".
Profile page (with video). Transcript.

Naomi Halas, Rice University nanotech expert.
Profile page (with video). Transcript.

Julie Schablitsky, archaeologist studying the Donner Party site and other areas important to the history of the American West.
Profile page (with video). Transcript.

Watching the videos (or reading the transcripts) of a bunch of the profiles, it's striking how much more the women profiled talked about their personal lives than the men. I don't know if that is because of the questions they were asked or not, but I was pretty surprised that Naomi Halas was asked point blank whether the reason she and her husband didn't have children because of her work. The answer: no, they wanted children, but she couldn't have them, which seems like a very personal revelation. When most the men were interviewed we don't even find out whether they have children or not, let alone whether they wanted to have kids. I realize that's likely because there is a social expectation is that "normal" women want to be mothers and are more interested in having a life outside the lab then men, but it's disappointing that the show's questions went in that direction.

Tags: scienceNOW, Cynthia Breazeal, Edith Widder

Barbara Liskov wins the 2008 Turing Award

So, finally, back to regular blogging with an excellent award story.

Earlier this month MIT Ford Professor of Engineering Barbara Liskov has been named the winner of the 2008 A.M. Turing Award. The award is presented by the Association for the Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. And "the contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field." It's often called the Nobel Prize in computing, which gives you a sense of the award's prestige.

In 1968 Liskov defended her dissertation - "A Program to Play Chess Endgames” - at Stanford University, becoming the first U.S. woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science. She told the web site "Engineer Girl" that the expectation that she, as a woman, wasn't really pursuing a career allowed to to focus on research that interested her:

I didn't have a plan for where I was going; instead I reacted to obstacles and opportunities. I believe that some of this was due to being a woman. When I was young, it was uncommon for women to think about having a career. The effect on me was that I just focused on doing work that was interesting but expected to stop working when I had a family. I got into research in software systems and I realized that I was really committed to my work and would not give it up. Later when my husband and I had a family, I continued to work full time.

Listen to her interview on Talk of the Nation for more about how she ended up in computer science. She tells Ira Flatow that she didn't feel particularly lonely as the only woman in her (very small) Ph.D. program, and felt like she was accepted like everyone else when she joined the faculty at MIT.

She ended up doing pioneering research "creating and implementing programming languages, operating systems, and innovative systems designs that have advanced the state of the art of data abstraction, modularity, fault tolerance, persistence, and distributed computing systems." The Boston Globe explained the significance of her achievements in slightly less technical terms:

In particular, Liskov developed two programming languages, CLU in the 1970s and Argus in the 1980s, that formed the underpinnings for languages like Java and C++, commonly used to write software applications for personal computers and the Internet. As such, her work helped to form society's information infrastructure.
[. . .]
In the early days of computing, programs were written as long strings of numbers and characters known as code, sometimes broken up by chunks. Liskov's work helped pioneer what is known as object-oriented programming, now the most common approach to software development. She is credited for laying the groundwork for development of sophisticated programs tailored to financial, medical, and other consumer and business applications.

I especially like the idea that her work formed the underpinnings of the software that makes my laptop run and lets my post this very post.

Her current research focuses on distributed computer systems like the internet and security of online storage. In more technical terms:

Her most recent research focuses on techniques that enable a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components. Her work on practical Byzantine fault tolerance demonstrated that there were more efficient ways of dealing with arbitrary (Byzantine) failures than had been previously known. Her insights have helped build robust, fault-tolerant distributed systems that are resistant to errors and hacking. This research is likely to change the way distributed system designers think about providing reliable service on today's modern, vulnerable Internet.

Liskov is only the second woman to win the Turing award. Two years ago IBM Fellow Emerita Fraces E. Allen was the first.

More reading:

• IEEE Global History Network: Barbara Liskov Oral History (1991)
• Discover Magazone: The 50 Most Important Women in Science (2002)
• CSAIL News: Prof. Barbara Liskov Wins the 2004 IEEE John Von Neumann Medal
• IEEE DS Interview: Barbara Liskov on Programming, Career, and the Future (2005)
• NPR Talk of the Nation: Computer Whiz Barbara Liskov Wins Turing Award
• MIT news: Q&A with Institute Professor Barbara Liskov (2009)
• MIT News: Barbara Liskov wins Turing Award (2009)

Tags: Barbara Liskov, Turing Award, computer science

Another Woman Scientist on the Obama Team: Lisa Perez Jackson of the EPA

On January 23rd, Lisa Perez Jackson was confirmed as the Administrator to the of the Environmental Protection Agency. Jackson earned her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans, followed by a Master's degree from Princeton University. She's the first African American and the fourth woman to serve in that position.

She began working with the EPA in 1986, developing hazardous waste cleanup regulations for federal Superfund sites. She ended up directing large cleanup operations in central New Jersey, which eventually lead to joining the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Eventually she was appointed the New Jersey Commissioner of Environmental Protection. The work she did there was characterized by the New York Times as one of her strengths:

Ms. Jackson, who is a chemical engineer, brought a more policy-driven approach to New Jersey’s historically politicized Department of Environmental Protection as its commissioner. During her 33 months in that job, the state began conducting compliance sweeps to crack down on polluters in environmentally ravaged sections of Camden and Paterson, ended its controversial bear hunt and unveiled a plan to reduce carbon emissions 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

On the other hand, the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility have been critical of her work there, claiming that she has a "highly politicized approach to decision-making that resulted in suppression of scientific information, issuance of gag orders and threats against professional staff members who dared to voice concerns." She has stated, though, that "science will prevail over politics" in the agency's decisions. In her first month on the job, she has pledged to reconsider or reverse several Bush administration directives that would have reduced regulation on greenhouse gas emissions. That sounds like a good start.

For more about Jackson's thoughts on the environment, see the January 29 interview with Jackson in Essence.

Tags: Lisa P Jackson, EPA, chemical engineer

Take the Pledge: Write about a woman in technology on Ada Lovelace Day

Journalist, tech writer and blogging consultant Suw Charman-Anderson has started a new project to draw attention to women who excel in technology. She's asking bloggers to take the Ada Lovelace Day pledge:

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."

As I write this post, 524 people have joined up, including me.

On the official Ada Lovelace Day blog Suw explains what inspired the project:

I’ve mainly stayed away from the discussion of gender issues in technology. I didn’t think that I had any real expertise to share. But over the last six months, after many conversations, it has become clear that many of my female friends in tech really do feel disempowered. They feel invisible, lacking in confidence, and unsure how to compete for attention with the men around them.

Then I see the stupid puerile misogynistic manner with which some of the more powerful voices in the tech community - some of them repeat offenders - treat women, and it makes me very cross indeed. The objectification of women is bad enough when it’s done by the media, but when it’s done by a conference organiser or tech commentator or famous tech publication, what message does it send? Nothing but “You will never be taken seriously, but we might take notice of you if you’re hot.”

On March 24th (hopefully) the 1000+ posts will end up highlighting the great contributions that women have made to technology, beyond providing eye candy for their male colleagues. Learn more at FindingAda.com and take the pledge.

(Of the posts Suw links to, I'd recommend starting at BitchBuzz Tech's "Two Big Reasons Why it's So Hard to Be a Woman in Tech")

You can see the latest pledge total on the image above.

Tags: Ada Lovelace Day, women in technology

Social Beavers and Normal Women

I hope that I am winning a way which others will keep open. Perhaps the fact that I am not a radical, and that I do not scorn womanly duties, but deem it a privilege to clean up and supervise the room and sew things, etc., is winning me stronger allies than anything else… I am useful in a general way, and they can’t say study spoils me for anything else.

~ Ellen Swallow Richards in a letter to a friend in 1872. She was the first woman admitted to MIT, where she earned a BS in chemistry in 1873.

I was browsing through the videos in MIT's TechTV collection and stumbled on "The Social Beaver". It was filmed in the early or mid-1960s, and depicts "typical" student life at MIT. It spends a few minutes focusing on the few women who were enrolled there.

In the embedded the video below, the segment about "girls" starts at about 6:15.


Looking back 45 or so years, the whole campus appears terribly old-fashioned. The filmmakers seemed to want to emphasize how "normal" the girls are. We see them relaxing in the girls-only dormitory ("no men allowed") in what the narrator calls "typically feminine fashion": knitting, chatting about boys and dates, and singing around a piano. Of course they study too, but "the studious beaver is also the social beaver"¹, and one young woman turns out to be doodling an evening gown instead of boning up on multivariable calculus.

What is particularly striking to me is where the young women aren't. The film shows all the different extracurricular activities open to students - the newspaper, the yearbook, band, radio station, rocket design club, a variety of intramural sports, student government and more - and all you see are male faces. It wasn't just because women "chose" to not participate: of all the sports in MIT's extensive intramural program, only sailing and fencing were open to women. While women were at the Institute it seems that they weren't really part of the Institute.

Of course part of the reason we see so few female faces was that women only made up about 5% of the student body in the 1960s. They wouldn't be particularly visible even if they did participate in campus activities. But they also had to contend with the attitude that all they really were interested in was boys and babies. Take, for example the 1964 symposium on Women in Science and Engineering hosted by MIT. One of the invited speakers was well-known psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim² who stated:

As much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers.

That's a helluva broad brush to paint half the human population with. Any woman who was focused on her research and career, happy to be single or childless, or uninterested in dating men would be considered unwomanly, at least by Bettelheim's standards. I doubt he was alone in that attitude, considering that even today many people still assume "normal" women are primarily interested in marriage and children. It's the usual no-win situation: traditionally feminine are assumed to not be focused on their careers, and women who focused on their careers were aren't "normal" women.

Interestingly, the percentage of women in the MIT student body began to shoot upward beginning in the early 1970s. This was correlated with two significant changes: the opening of co-ed dorms, so that the open slots in the women's dormitory didn't limit women's enrollment, and a switch to gender-blind admissions. Currently women make up more than 40% of the MIT undergraduate population and 30% of the graduate school population. And they definitely participate in intramural sports.

1. Yes, you have a dirty mind. However it may be noted that the sports teams at MIT are currently called the Engineers, rather than the Beavers.

2. Bettleheim is best known for popularizing the "refrigerator mother" explanation for autism. The idea is pretty much how it sounds: "emotionally frigid" women cause their children to become autistic. This has been discredited here in the US, but apparently is still a popular notion elsewhere.

Tags: MIT, women in science, women in engineering

Montreal Massacre

Saturday December 6th was the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada. On that day in 1989 fourteen young women were massacred at the l'École Polytechnique in Montréal. The murderer, Marc Lépine, entered a classroom where a mechanical engineering class was in progress and separated the male and female students at gunpoint. After ordering the men to leave, he reported told the women "I am fighting feminism."

One of the students, Nathalie Provost, said, "Look, we are just women studying engineering, not necessarily feminists ready to march on the streets to shout we are against men, just students intent on leading a normal life." Lépine responded that "You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists."

Lepine opened fire, killing six women and wounding three others. He then continued shooting as he walked through the building, leaving 14 dead and 14 wounded.

The victims:

• Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student.
• Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student.
• Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student.
• Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student.
• Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student.
• Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student.
• Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique's finance department.
• Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student.
• Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student.
• Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student.
• Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student.
• Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student.
• Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student.
• Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student.

If they had lived, they would have been about my age. Perhaps today they would be successful engineers. Perhaps they would have been married once or even twice. Perhaps they would have had children. Perhaps none of those things. Their lives were cut short long before they could finish living them.

More at Sciencewomen.

Image: Plaque commemorating the victims of the massacre at École Polytechnique.
Tags: Montreal Massacre, women in engineering

Amy Smith: Simple Solutions to Big Problems

MIT engineering instructor Amy Smith eschews high tech gadgets and glossy technology for practical solutions to the problems of some of the poorest people in the world. An article about Smith in Popular Mechanics focused on her recent work in Peru, developing a method of turning old corncobs into charcoal:

[...] Smith is a rising star in a field known as appropriate technology, which focuses on practical, usually small-scale designs to solve problems in the developing world. She has brought four undergrads to Compone, along with Jesse Austin-Breneman, an MIT graduate who works for a community organization in Peru, and one of her engineering collaborators, 53-year-old Gwyndaf Jones. To get here, the team has lugged bags of tools and low-tech gadgets, water-testing equipment and a heavy wooden crate bearing a pedal-powered grain mill more than 3500 miles in taxis, airplanes and buses.

The charcoal project is the responsibility of Mary Hong, a 19-year-old branching out beyond her aerospace major this semester. She and the other students, coincidentally all women, are enrolled in Smith's D-Lab, a course that is becoming quietly famous beyond the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. The D is for development, design and dissemination; last fall, more than 100 students applied for about 30 slots. To prepare for their field work, D-Lab students live for a week in Cambridge on $2 per day. (Smith joins in.) Right now, eight more D-Lab teams are plying jungle rivers, hiking goat trails and hailing chicken buses in seven additional countries—Brazil, Honduras, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, India and China. In Smith's view, even harsh aspects of Third World travel have their benefits. "If you get a good bout of diarrhea from a waterborne disease," she says, "you really understand what it means to have access to clean drinking water."

I imagine it's quite a shock for students to go from relatively cushy student life in Cambridge to countries where rough conditions are the norm and access to clean drinking water isn't guaranteed (it certainly would be fore me). I think it would also be quite challenging to try to come up with engineering solutions when resources are extremely limited - a far cry from the well-equipped labs at MIT. But it must be immensely satisfying to work on projects that directly improve people's quality of life, even if it does mean the occasional case of the runs.

Smith has received a number of honors for her work: she was the first woman to win the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize in 2000, and was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2004.

In 2006 she gave a TED talk about turning farm waste into fuel:


Smith also organizes the annual International Development Design Summit, which brings together professors, students, craftsmen, members of industry and others interested developing innovative prototypes to help the developing world. See her 7 Rules of Low-Cost Design for more about her approach to engineering.

(via Metafilter)

Tags: Amy Smith, D-Lab, Appropriate Technology

Nominations Open for the 2009 Women of Vision Awards

The Anita Borg Institute is now accepting nominations for the 2009 Women of Vision Awards in three categories:

Innovation recognizes a woman who has contributed significantly to technology innovation. The innovation might be creating unusual and important technology or approaching developing technology in a significantly new and innovative way, such as by bringing diverse people and experiences together in the technology creation process.

Social Impact recognizes a woman who developed or applied technology with a significant impact on society and/or the community. These people are creating or employing technologies that are changing our world in positive ways.

Leadership recognizes a woman who has led an important technology development or innovation, made a significant contribution to the technology industry, and someone who inspires others.

The winners will be honored at the Women of Vision Awards Dinner on April 30th 2009 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California.

The 2008 winners:

• Innovation: Helen Greiner, Co-founder and Chairman, iRobot
• Social Impact: Susan Landau, Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems
• Leadership Award: Justine Cassell, director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern University, at AT&T Professor of Communication and Computer Science
  

Make a nomination for the 2009 award.

Tags: Anita Borg Institute, Women of Vision Award

Margaret B. Bailey: Winner of the Maria Mitchell Women in Science Award

"In my younger days when I was pained by half educated, loose and inaccurate ways which we all had, I used to say, 'How much women need exact science.' But since I have known some workers in science who were not always true to the teaching of nature, who have loved self more than science, I have said, 'How much science needs women.'"

-Maria Mitchell (1818-1889)

Most of you readers have likely heard of Maria Mitchell, the 19th century astronomer who became the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was a professor of astronomy at Vassar College, where she was the first director of the Vassar College Observatory, a position she held until the year before her death in 1889. But she was born and raised on the island of Nantucket, where she first learned astronomy from her schoolteacher father, and where she opened her own school in 1835.

Today the Maria Mitchell Association of Nantucket honors her memory every year with the Maria Mitchell Women in Science Award, which is given to "an individual whose efforts have encouraged the advancement of girls and women in the natural and physical sciences, mathematics, engineering, computer science and technology." This year's winner is Dr. Margaret B. Bailey, Kate Gleason Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of mechanical engineering at the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology. From the award announcement:

Dr Bailey is the founder and executive director of WE@RIT (Women in Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology) where she leads a dynamic organization that aims to improve the retention of current women engineering students, as well as expand the pipeline of future women engineers through the delivery of a series of outreach programs for girls and women in K-12 grades. Mentoring is at the core of the WE@RIT programs from linking first-year with upper-level engineering students, utilizing undergraduate engineering students in the K-12 outreach programs, and a bi-weekly workshop series for RIT female engineering students. Dr. Bailey has also created a two week engineering camp for 4^th-9^th graders, “Everyday Engineering,” led by RIT women engineering students, and a shadowing program RIT undergraduates with professional engineers. Clearly a catalyst for improving gender diversity at RIT, Dr. Bailey’s programmatic ideas and initiatives are easily replicable at colleges, universities, schools and workplaces. Dr. Bailey plans to use the $5000 MM-WISA cash award, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, to work with a small group of science and math teachers to improve the quality and transferability of the “Everyday Engineering” curriculum to other universities and/or 4^th-9^th grade classrooms.

Earlier this year the WE@RIT program was awarded the WEPAN Women in Engineering Program Award, as "a model for other WIE organizations demonstrating best practices in comprehensive pre-college outreach, recruitment, and community building initiatives."

Bailey feels strongly that increasing the number of women engineers is an important goal:

The United States needs to double the number of female engineers—to three in 10—in order for the nation to capitalize on the intellectual capital of women and attain its true potential for innovation.

That forceful advice comes from Margaret Bailey, the Kate Gleason Chair and professor of mechanical engineering in RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering in remarks on the RIT news podcast Studio 86. The specificity of her call to action—that we need three in 10 women engineers in this country—is what makes it such a compelling point (as opposed to a wishy-washy phrase saying the world needs more female engineers). [...] Bailey says reaching a “critical mass” of 30 percent female engineers (more than twice the current number)—along with achieving other diversity goals—will lead to more and greater technological advances.

The point she seems to be making is not so much that women have special skills that men do not (even though that's the impression given by the article I linked to above), but that the engineering community is missing out on a large pool of potential new ideas and expertise when women chose to pursue careers other than engineering. Listen to the full interview, in which Bailey talks about women in engineering and the university's engineering and mentoring programs for girls.

In addition to directing the WE@RIT program, Bailey also directs graduate students, performs research in the field of energy conservation, and teaches several courses.

Bailey will be presented with the Maria Mitchell Women in Science Award at a ceremony on September 19th.

Tags: Margaret B. Bailey, Maria Mitchell Women in Science Award, women in engineering

Nicole Kuepper: Winner of an Australian Science Oscar

Australians have a new favorite scientist: 23-year-old graduate student Nicole Kuepper has won the People's Choice Award in the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes. It's actually a double win, since she's also receiving the British Council Eureka Prize for Young Leaders in Environmental Issues and Climate Change.

Kuepper is a PhD student and lecturer at the School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering at the University of New South Wales. While there she and her colleagues developed and patented the iJET solar cell, which can be made cheaply from common items such as nail polish, an inkjet printer and a pizza oven. According to an article in The Australian:

"Nicole's iJET solar cell will potentially bring affordable electricity to the poorest people in the world, but more than this, it will be clean and renewable."

Current production techniques for photovoltaic, or solar, cells make them expensive, but the iJET can be made without high-tech environments or components.

Kuepper has be interested in the technology every since her parents gave her a solar energy kit for her 10th birthday. But she's not just interested in the engineering side of solar power:

An advocate of green technology, she gives talks about solar energy to the public, has held miniature solar car races to teach indigenous children about renewable energy, and was a delegate at the 2020 Youth Summit in Canberra in April.

It's understandable how the technology and Kuepper caught the public's imagination.

For more technical information, here's a recent publication:

Kuepper, N., Utama, R., Guo, A., Wells, M., Ho, AWY, and Wenham, SR. “Photovoltaic technology for developing countries” 22nd European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition (Milan, 2007) (pdf)

(via Dvice and Abby @ The Hacker Chick Blog)

Tags: Nicole Kuepper, Eureka Prize, solar cells

Technology Review's TR35

This month's issue of MIT Technology Review presents their annual list of the "top 35 young innovators under 35". Seven of the winners were women.

Biotech:

• Michelle Chang, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, designs microbes that make fuel and drugs. Read Chang's TR35 profile.
• Milica Radisic, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto, develops methods of patching damaged hearts with embryonic stem cells. Read Radisic's TR35 profile.
  

Infotech:

• Tanzeem Choudhury, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth, works on methods of automatically inferring social networks. Read Choudhury's TR35 profile.
• Farinaz Koushanfar, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, is developing methods of "locking" microchips to prevent hardware piracy. Read Koushanfar's TR35 profile.
• Meredith Ringel Morris, computer scientist in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research, developed a plugin for Internet Explorer that allows groups to search collaboratively. Read Morris's T35 profile.
  

Nanotech:

• Aimée Rose, Principle Investigator at ICx Technologies, was awarded the TR35 Humanitarian Award for her work developing ultrasensitive portable chemical "sniffers" for the detection of explosives. Read Rose's TR35 Profile.
  
• Julia Greer, Assistant Professor of Materials Science at CalTech, developed and improved methods of studying the mechanical properties of nanoscale materials. Read Greer's TR35 profile.

Tags: Technology Review, TR35, women in science, women in engineering

She's Such a Geek @Google Talks

The AtGoogleTalks channel at YouTube has videos of a number of presentations by authors, politicians, and women (who don't fall into the other categories) at Google. Not surprisingly, many of the talks are aimed at the relatively geeky Google audience.

As part of the Authors@Google series Annalee Newitz, Charlie Anders, Ellen Spertus, & Jenn Shreve discuss She's Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff. Newitz and Anders were the book's editors, Spertus (a Google employee) and Shreve were contributors.

On a more technical level is the talk by University of Washington psychology professor Sapna Cheryan on "her research into the problems women face entering and remaining it the fields of CS and engineering." Watch Cheryan's presentation. (Unfortunately, the quality of this video isn't very good.)

(via my brother - thanks Bri!)
Tags: women in computer science, AtGoogleTalks, She's Such a Geek

Women in Science Link Roundup: August 16 Edition

Here are some women-in-science related blog posts and articles from the past few weeks (in no particular order):

Inside Higher Ed writes about the "Keys to Hiring Women in Science"

From the British Psychological Society Research Digest Blog: Gender stereotypes can distort our memories

An initial study with 73 high school students (34 boys) showed that those students who more strongly endorsed gender stereotypes in relation to maths and the arts, subsequently showed more biased recall of their past exam performance. That is, girls who endorsed the stereotypes underestimated their past maths performance, while boys who endorsed the stereotypes tended to underestimate their past arts performance.

In an older post, Rob Knop writes about the myth of the meritocracy in physics. (via DrugMonkey)

The Barnard Alumnae magazine has a profile of applied physics and mathematics professor Gertrude Neumark Rothschild, class of '48.

UNESCO interviews two previous L'Oreal Women in Science award winners:
• Khady Nani Dramé on why peasant rice farmers need no longer
sustain heavy losses in times of drought
• Andrea Mantesso explains why teeth will help to shape the future
of stem cell research

From the Sunday Herald: "Ascent of woman: How females lead ape studies"

ScienceNews reviews Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics

Annalee Newitz at io9 talks to scientist and science fiction novelist Ekaterina Sedia about female robots and chemical prejudice

ScienceWoman proposes "Scientists are people too, and it's time we started traeting them that way"

Chad Orzel on why self-esteem is not why students are being turned off from science.
PZ Myers writes about motivating students (and motivating women) to pursue science careers

At Feministe Octagalore writes about the effect of the economy on women "choosing" to leave the workforce.

CNN reports "Anger in the office - it hurts women more". So just stop complaining, don't nag, and just let it go if it's not too important. Said one "expert": "I always tell women on the job, kill them with kindness," she says. So I guess the trick is to just smile, then blog about it anonymously.

Business week has a slide show featuring this year's winners of the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair - all girls!

Lifehacker talks to Dr. Horrible actress Felicia Day about being a "geek-girl". Her major in math was a "fallback" degree in case music didn't pan out.

Tags: women in science, gender gap, stereotypes

Ice Stories

The Exploratorium has collected a bunch of blogs under the heading "Ice Stores: Dispatches from Polar Scientists", which showcases scientists working at the poles. Not surprisingly the research is seasonal: scientists work in Antarctica during the Northern Hemisphere's winter (so summer at the South Pole), while research in the Arctic is going on now. A number of women scientists are part of the effort.

In the Arctic:

• Anne Jensen "lives and works in Barrow, Alaska. Anne’s field studies have taken her throughout much of Alaska for the past 25 years. Her research in human adaptation in the Arctic includes a long-term project at the prehistoric village site of Nuvuk, where the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas come together. Historic Nuvuk is also the site of a 1,000-year-old burial ground. Hundreds of gravesites are endangered there by erosion, which sometimes removes 50 feet of coastal frontage in a single storm."
• Amy Breen "has studied the impacts of climate change on Arctic plant communities for nearly a decade. She is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, and a member of a team of circumpolar scientists participating in the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX). In July 2008, she’ll begin blogging from the Toolik Field Station, her field site in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range in Alaska."
• Laura Thomas "is an archaeologist and full-time resident of Barrow, Alaska. As the Field and Lab Director for the Nuvuk Archaeology Project, Laura devotes her time to the long-term excavation of a 1,000-year-old burial ground significantly threatened by erosion. Born and raised amongst the rich geological history of Ontario, Canada, Laura has held a lifelong interest in prehistory and how past peoples adapted to their environments. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto, and describes her archaeological work in the Arctic as 'living the dream.'"
• Zoe Courville "studies snow and ice in polar regions. She received her PhD in material science from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in 2007. She is currently employed as a research mechanical engineer at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab in Hanover, New Hampshire. She loves working in the polar ice caps and sharing her experiences with others."

In the Antarctic:

• Cassandra Brooks "is a graduate student in Marine Science at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML) in California who has studied Antarctic marine resources for the last four years both at MLML and with the Antarctic Marine Living Resources Program (AMLR). Cassandra’s work focuses on life history and population structure of Antarctic toothfish. Her goal is to provide information on their age, growth, and spatial distribution in order to facilitate sustainable management of this important Antarctic species."
• Christina Riesselman "has traveled to Antarctica three times in pursuit of fossil diatoms that can unlock the secrets of past climate change. She's a Ph.D. student at Stanford University's Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences and a member of the international team of scientists working on the ANDRILL sediment coring project."
• Nadine Quintana Krupinski "studies the dynamics of ice sheets and the waterways that exist under glaciers. She's a glaciology Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and enjoys working on isolated glaciers in the world's polar regions."
• Maria Vernet "has been a primary investigator on thirteen research cruises off the Western Antarctic Peninsula, exploring one of the coldest marine ecosystems on earth. She's a marine biologist from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. During winter 2008, she studied the ecology of phytoplankton and its role within the marine ecosystem at the Palmer Station Long-Term Ecological Research Network (LTER). From May 31 to June 20, 2008, Maria is on board the Nathaniel B. Palmer icebreaker in the northwest Weddell Sea, collecting plankton samples from under and around large free-floating icebergs that have broken off from the Antarctic Ice shelf."
• Kathryn Schaffer Miknaitis "dreamed of becoming an artist but fell in love with physics in graduate school. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago's Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and pursues questions about the origin and history of the universe on the South Pole Telescope team. She arrived at the South Pole in November 2007 and blogged about her work on the telescope until she left in February 2008."

If you click on the scientists' names, you'll not only get to their blogs, but you can learn more information about the projects they are working on. It's an interesting glimpse into doing scientific research under extreme environmental conditions.

Tags: women in science, Arctic research, Antarctic research, blogs