Our list of influential women in physics from the past 10 years highlights the major contributions that women have made to this fascinating field. Physicists study a wide range of topics including gravity, planetary movement, and atomic structures. Understanding how these these forces are affected by space and time requires diving deep into the past, all the way back to the big bang, as well as projecting accurately what will occur in years to come.
Physics is one of the oldest scientific disciplines, tracing its roots back to ancient astronomy and geometry. Aristotle is credited with first using the word “physics” to describe the subject in the fourth century BC. The field grew throughout the centuries and became associated with famous names such as a Galileo and Newton.
Modern physics began to take shape with the advancements made by Max Planck and Albert Einstein in the early 20th century. Women began taking active roles in physics around this time, with Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize-winning work on radioactivity in 1903. It wasn’t until 1945 however that Kathleen Lonsdale became the first woman inducted into the Royal Society of London, one of the leading scientific organizations in the world. Progress remained even slower for African American women. Shirley Jackson was the first African American woman to receive a PhD from MIT, a feat not accomplished until 1973.
Physics ranks last in the sciences for the percentage of women entering the field. According to the National Science Foundation women made up only 20% of physics degree-seekers across all levels in 2014. As women are still paid 18% less than their male counterparts, aspiring female physicists must follow in the footsteps of the pioneering women of the 20th century to overcome significant barriers.
The women on our list have made progress toward making the field more equitable and diverse, while also conducting cutting-edge research. #7 Priyamvada Natarajan has contributed to the understanding of dark matter, gravitational lensing, and supermassive black holes. #11 Claudia de Rham studies the intersection between gravity, cosmology, and particle physics, winning the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2020. Jennifer Wiseman is currently the Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope. The progress made by the women on our list shows how important the work of physicists can be to gaining a better understanding of the world around us.
Areas of Specialization: Astrophysics, Radio Pulsars
Jocelyn Bell Burnell currently holds the title of Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. Previously, she has held professorial and administrative roles at the University of Bath, Princeton University, the Open University, UCL Institute of Education, and University of Southampton. She was also president of the Royal Astronomical Society, president of the Institute of Physics, worked on the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, and was project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Native to Northern Ireland, Burnell earned her BS in natural philosophy at University of Glasgow in 1965, and her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1969.
Burnell is quite famous for discovering the first radio pulsars while still a graduate student in 1967. While Burnell's name was included among the five authors of the paper that won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, Bell did not receive a prize or recognition from the committee; this has been a point of controversy, though Burnell does not herself seem to take issue with it. Given her presence at so many major institutions, both inside and outside of academia, Burnell's influence in astrophysics is a fundamental one. Her role in advancing our knowledge of pulsars, as well as the application of radio telescopes, has guided the field into the twenty-first century.
Areas of Specialization: Intense Laser-Matter Interactions, Nonlinear Optics, Chirped Pulse Amplification
Donna Theo Strickland was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She is currently a Professor of Physics at the University of Waterloo. She is the first woman to hold this position at the University.
She obtained her bachelor's degree in engineering physics in 1981 from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. At McMaster, she specialized in lasers and electro-optics. She then received her PhD in physics in 1989 from University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, where she worked at the Institute of Optics and the Institute for Laser Optics. She wrote her dissertation under the supervision of Gérard Mourou.
In 1985, Strickland and Mourou published the technique they had developed known as chirped pulse amplification (CPA), a method for amplifying ultrashort laser pulses to a very-high intensity (petawatt level).Afterwards, CPA was developed by others as the basis for the widespread use of small high-power laboratory laser systems, known as "table-top terawatt lasers."
Areas of Specialization: Theorectical Physics, Quantum Gravity
Sabine Hossenfelder is currently a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, and heads the Analog Systems for Gravity Duals group. She was previously a professor at Nordita in Stockholm, Sweden, and has held fellowships at University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Arizona. Hossenfelder completed her BS in mathematics at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany in 1997, and stayed there for her MS and PhD studies in theoretical physics, completed in 2003.
Hossenfelder is well known as a prominent figure in popular science, especially in regards to theoretical physics and her primary research interest of quantum gravity. She has published books such as Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray and pieces in magazines including Forbes, Quanta Magazine, and New Scientist, and is involved with the annual Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity conference series.
Image Credits:
Top row, left to right: Patricia Hill Collins, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Malala Yousafzai, Shafi Goldwasser, Jennifer Doudna, Fabiola Gianotti, Michiko Kakutani, Lauren Underwood.
Bottom row, left to right: Fei-Fei Li, Esther Duflo, Kathy Reichs, Nancy Fraser, Brené Brown, Judith Curry, Jill Lepore, Zaha Hadid.