Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu in 1963 at Columbia University, where she was a professor. Known as the First Lady of Physics, Wu worked on the Manhattan Project and helped disprove a widely-accepted law of theoretical physics. Later in her life, Wu researched molecular changes in hemoglobin associated with sickle-cell anemia.

Credit: Smithsonian Institution Archives, image SIA2010-1507.

Civil engineer Nora Stanton Blatch worked for the American Bridge Company and the New York City Board of Water Supply. She was also an active suffragette, campaigning across New York State to secure women the right to vote. This photo was taken in 1921.

Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Oceanographer Margaret Robinson in 1953. A business school graduate and former teacher, Robinson started work at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography as a clerk, recording data on ocean temperatures. She published atlases for seas across the world, and helped provide source material for many oceanographic expeditions.

Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography photographic laboratory, UC San Diego

Annie Easley was a mathematician who began working at NASA in 1955. She worked in the Launch Vehicles Division, developing coding used in solar and wind energy experiments. Her strategy for coping with racial and gender discrimination was to focus on the work. "I'm out here to do a job and I knew I had the ability to do it," she once said.

Credit: NASA

Esther Lederberg in the lab in the 1950s while attending the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposia. Lederberg is known for discovering the lambda bacteriophage in 1951, the first recognized organism that can invade bacteria and live in its DNA. The breakthrough was important for studying similar viruses in animals.

Credit: The Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg Memorial Website.

Barbara McClintock in 1983, the year she won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. McClintock's research on South American maize uncovered transposable elements, pieces of DNA that can move within a genome, controlling gene expression and resulting in mutations.

Credit: National Library of Medicine, courtesy of The Barbara McClintock Papers, American Philosophical Society