Twitter: @LostWomenofSci
Site: lostwomenofscience.org
72 episodes
2021 to present
Average episode: 24 minutes
Open in Apple Podcasts • RSS
Categories: Science-Adjacent
Podcaster's summary: For every Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin whose story has been told, hundreds of female scientists remain unknown to the public at large. In this series, we illuminate the lives and work of a diverse array of groundbreaking scientists who, because of time, place and gender, have gone largely unrecognized. Each season we focus on a different scientist, putting her narrative into context, explaining not just the science but also the social and historical conditions in which she lived and worked. We also bring these stories to the present, painting a full picture of how her work endures.
| Episodes |
| 2024-Apr-18 • 31 minutes The Theoretical Physicist Who Worked With J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age Melba Phillips co-authored a paper with J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1935 that proved important in the development of nuclear physics. Later, she became an outspoken critic of nuclear weapons. |
| 2024-Apr-11 • 30 minutes Best Of: The Highest of All Ceilings, Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Nearly 100 years ago, a young astronomer named Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin told us what stars are made of and turned the world on its head. No one believed her at first. Later, she was proven right. |
| 2024-Apr-04 • 31 minutes The Victorian Woman Who Chased Eclipses Annie Maunder was an astronomer who expanded our understanding of the sun at the turn of the 20th century. Her passion was photographing eclipses. |
| 2024-Mar-28 • 26 minutes Lost Women of Science Conversations: Mischievous Creatures Two sisters made significant contributions to botany and entomology but their stories were erased – accidentally and by design – from the history of early American science. Catherine McNeur tells us how she rediscovered them. |
| 2024-Mar-21 • 17 minutes The Cognitive Scientist Who Unraveled the Mysteries of Language Ursula Bellugi became fixated on the question of how we learn language. Her research on sign language in particular had a major impact on our understanding of how language skills and biology are interconnected. |
| 2024-Mar-14 • 23 minutes Best Of: Meet the Physicist who Spoke Out Against the Bomb She Helped Create Days after Oppenheimer won big at the Oscars, we look at the life and scientific contributions of nuclear physicist Kay Way, who worked on the Manhattan Project but ended up rallying fellow scientists to oppose the use of nuclear weapons. |
| 2024-Mar-07 • 39 minutes How Lilian Bland Built Herself A Plane In 1910, an Anglo-Irish women named Lilian Bland built a plane, with little to no encouragement from her family or aviation enthusiasts. Shortly after the plane took off, she quit flying, moving on to her next challenge. |
| 2024-Feb-29 • 28 minutes Lost Women of Science Conversations: The Black Angels Black nurses worked through unsanitary conditions and racial prejudice to help patients through the debilitating disease TB before a cure was found—with their help |
| 2024-Feb-15 • 13 minutes The Industrial Designer Behind the N95 Mask Sara Little Turnbull used material science to invent and design products for the modern world. |
| 2024-Feb-08 • 29 minutes The Universe in Radio Vision Ruby Payne-Scott helped unlock a new way of seeing the universe, but to keep her job, Ruby had to keep a big secret. |
| 2024-Feb-01 • 15 minutes From Our Inbox: Forgotten Electrical Engineer’s Work Paved the Way for Radar Technology Sallie Pero Mead made major discoveries about how electromagnetic waves propagate, which allowed objects to be detected at a distance. |
| 2024-Jan-25 • 37 minutes Best of: A Complicated Woman, Leona Zacharias A blindness epidemic among premature babies, and a brilliant biologist whose story hits close to home here at Lost Women of Science. |
| 2024-Jan-11 • 13 minutes From Our Inbox: Vera Peters - The Doctor Who Helped Spare Women From Radical Mastectomy Vera Peters began her career studying treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma. She used techniques that had seen positive outcomes on Hodgkin’s to treat breast cancer patients, and she discovered a treatment that was equally effective and much less invasive than the radical mastectomy, saving hundreds of thousands of women from that life-altering surgery. |
| 2024-Jan-04 • 32 minutes Adventures of a Bone Hunter Annie Montague Alexander went on paleontology expeditions most women could only dream of in the early 1900s. |
| 2023-Dec-14 • 20 minutes Emma Unson Rotor: The Filipina Physicist Who Helped Develop a Top Secret Weapon Emma Unson Rotor worked on the proximity fuze, a groundbreaking piece of World War II weapons technology that the U.S. War Department called “second only to the atomic bomb.” |
| 2023-Dec-07 • 26 minutes Flapper of the South Seas: A Young Margaret Mead Travels To The South Seas Anthropologist Margaret Mead journeyed to American Samoa in 1925 to explore adolescent development. Fame and controversy followed the publication of her book Coming of Age in Samoa. |
| 2023-Nov-30 • 28 minutes The Devastating Logic of Christine Ladd-Franklin Christine Ladd-Franklin is best known for her theory of the evolution of color vision, but her research spanned math, symbolic logic, philosophy, biology, and psychology. Born in Connecticut in 1847, she was clever, sharp-tongued, and never shied away from a battle of wits. When she decided to go to college instead of pursuing a marriage, she convinced her skeptical grandmother by pointing to statistics: there was an excess of women in New England, so a husband would be hard to find; she’d better get an edu... |
| 2023-Nov-23 • 22 minutes Best Of: The Feminist Test We Keep Failing What are the rules of engagement when writing the stories of female scientists? We talk with the women who came up with the Finkbeiner Test, a checklist to keep sexism out of the narrative. |
| 2023-Nov-16 • 11 minutes From Our Inbox: Mária Telkes, The Biophysicist Who Harnessed Solar Power Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventor Mária Telkes, who was nicknamed The Sun Queen, created a solar oven and one of the first solar-heated houses in 1948. |
| 2023-Nov-09 • 31 minutes The Woman Who Demonstrated the Greenhouse Effect In 1856, decades before the term “greenhouse gas” was coined, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the greenhouse effect in her home laboratory. She placed a glass cylinder full of carbon dioxide in the sun, and found that it heated up much faster than a cylinder of ordinary air. Her conclusion: more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in a warmer planet. Several years later, a British scientist named John Tyndall conducted a far more complicated experiment that demonstrated the same effect and revealed ho... |
| 2023-Nov-02 • 35 minutes Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, America's First Black Female Public Health Pioneer While the Civil War raged, Rebecca Crumpler became the first Black woman in the U.S. to earn an MD and to write a medical book, a popular guide with a preventive approach |
| 2023-Oct-26 • 37 minutes Flemmie Kittrell and the Preschool Experiment In the 1960s, a Black home economist at Howard University recruited kids for an experimental preschool program. All were Black and lived in poor neighborhoods around campus. Flemmie Kittrell had grown up poor herself, just two generations removed from slavery, and she’d seen firsthand the effects of poverty. While Flemmie earned a PhD from Cornell, most of her siblings didn’t make it to college. One of her sisters died at just 22 years old of malnutrition. And it was the combination of these experiences th... |
| 2023-Oct-19 • 12 minutes From Our Inbox: A Microbe Hunter in Oregon Fights the 1918 Influenza Pandemic It's a global pandemic. The year is not 2020 but 1918, and Harriet Jane Lawrence is developing a vaccine against the deadliest influenza outbreak the world has ever seen. |
| 2023-Oct-12 • 35 minutes The English Lit Major Who Cracked Nazi Codes How Elizebeth Smith Friedman went from scouring Shakespeare for secret codes to taking down Nazi spy rings |
| 2023-Oct-05 • 30 minutes Who was Christine Essenberg? A remarkable zoologist almost lost to history How eight pages hidden in an archive led to the the discovery of the remarkable life of one of the first female zoologist |
| 2023-Sep-28 • 32 minutes Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser, an ex-slave’s daughter, becomes a celebrated doctor Born in 1850, Sarah Loguen found her calling as a child, when she helped her parents and Harriet Tubman bandage the leg of an injured person escaping slavery. When the Civil War ended and Reconstruction opened up opportunities for African Americans, Loguen became one of the first Black women to earn a medical license. But quickly, racist Jim Crow laws prevailed. At the urging of family friend Frederick Douglass, Loguen married and, with her new husband, set sail for the Dominican Republic where more was pos... |
| 2023-Sep-21 • 35 minutes A Flair for Efficiency: The Woman Who Redesigned the American Kitchen In the late 1920s, Lillian Gilbreth enlisted her children — she had 11— in an experiment: bake a strawberry shortcake in record time. Kitchens at the time tended to have haphazard configurations—pots and pans could be at one end of the kitchen, the stove in another, and the utensils in another room altogether—but Lillian figured that with a well-designed kitchen, she could slash baking time dramatically and make cooks’ lives easier. And if anyone was going to hack the kitchen, Lillian Gilbreth was the woman... |
| 2023-Sep-14 • 26 minutes Part 2: Why Did Lise Meitner Never Receive the Nobel Prize for Splitting the Atom? We continue the story of Jewish physicist Lise Meitner, the first person to understand that the atom had been split. This is the second in a two-part series featuring new letters from and to Lise Meitner translated by author Marissa Moss, author of The Woman who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner (2022). The letters show the fraught and complex relationship between Otto Hahn and Meitner and the role that antisemitism played in the decision to give the Nobel Prize in 1944 to Hahn and not Meitner. Afte... |
| 2023-Sep-07 • 26 minutes Part 1: Why Did Lise Meitner Never Receive the Nobel Prize for Splitting the Atom? New translations of Meitner’s letters show that antisemitism before and after World War II robbed Meitner of the 1944 Nobel Prize that went to her long-time collaborator chemist Otto Hahn. |
| 2023-Aug-31 • 11 minutes They Remembered the Lost Women of the Manhattan Project So That We Wouldn't Forget In the early 1990s, two physicists, Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg, began looking into a question that had aroused their curiosity: Just who were the female scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project? Nearly ten years and hundreds of interviews later, they documented hundreds of women across a broad spectrum of scientific fields — physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics — who played crucial roles in the top-secret race to build a nuclear weapon that would end World War II. Since the film Oppenhe... |
| 2023-Aug-24 • 22 minutes Meet the Physicist who Spoke Out Against the Bomb She Helped Create Kay Way was a nuclear physicist who was an expert in radioactive decay. After working on the atomic bomb she became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons. |
| 2023-Aug-17 • 19 minutes The Story of the Real Lilli Hornig, the Only Female Scientist Named in the Film Oppenheimer Lilli Hornig is the only female scientist mentioned by name in the film Oppenheimer. Here's the story of the real Lilli Hornig. |
| 2023-Aug-03 • 16 minutes No Place for a Woman in Mathematics? The Woman Who Ended up Supervising The Computations that Proved an Atomic Bomb Would Work Naomi Livesay supervised the mechanical computing operation at Los Alamos and worked on computations that formed the mathematical basis for implosion simulations. Despite her crucial role on the project, she has rarely been mentioned as more than a footnote. Until now. |
| 2023-Jul-27 • 15 minutes Blood, Sweat, and Fears: The Story of Floy Agnes Lee, the Young Woman Who Analyzed the Blood of Manhattan Project Scientists Floy Agnes Lee was a hematologist at Los Alamos. Recruited to the Manhattan Project while still a student at University of New Mexico, she collected blood samples from many Manhattan Project scientists, including Louis Slotin, following an accident that exposed him to a fatal dose of radiation. Years after the war, she returned to Los Alamos National Laboratory and conducted research on the impact of radiation on chromosomes. |
| 2023-Jul-20 • 12 minutes One of Many Lost Women of the Manhattan Project: Leona Woods Marshall Libby Leona Woods Marshall Libby was the only woman hired onto Enrico Fermi's team at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. She was just 23 years old, already had a Ph.D. in molecular spectroscopy and a deep understanding of vacuum technology. She was also the only woman present at the world’s first successful nuclear chain reaction. Amid all this, she managed to conceal her pregnancy until two days before her baby was born. |
| 2023-Jul-13 • 2 minutes Women of the Manhattan Project: Trailer During World War II, thousands of scientists and engineers worked on the Manhattan project, the top secret push to develop an atomic bomb that would end the war. Two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did just that, while also killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. The devastating potential of nuclear weapons sparked a moral controversy that continues to this day. Hundreds of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project were women. Over the next few weeks we’ll be bringing you a fe... |
| 2023-Jul-06 • 7 minutes From Our Inbox: Alessandra Giliani, 14th-century Italian anatomist 700 years ago, a girl braved all for science. Alessandra Giliani was the first female anatomist of the western world. The only way she could work was disguised as a man. |
| 2023-Jun-22 • 29 minutes The Highest of All Ceilings: Astronomer Cecilia Payne Cecilia Payne was in her early 20s when she figured out what the stars are made of. Both she and her groundbreaking findings were ahead of their time. Continuing the legacy of women working at the Harvard Observatory, Cecilia charted the way for a generation of female astronomers to come. This episode of Lost Women of Science: shorts follows Cecilia’s journey of discovery, journals her drive and determination against all odds, and takes you to the Harvard Observatory itself to walk in Cecilia’s footsteps. |
| 2023-Jun-01 • 20 minutes What's in a Street Name? Everything. In 1992, a Dutch doctor named Josh von Soer Clemm von Hohenberg wrote a letter to Henning Voscherau, the mayor of Hamburg, Germany, requesting that a street be named after Marie Nyswander. The doctor had never met Marie, but he had founded a clinic for treating people with drug addiction, and he’d seen methadone treatment — co-developed by Marie — save lives. Four years later, doctors gathered on a street in northwest Hamburg to celebrate that street’s new name: Nyswanderweg. We’re investigating how German... |
| 2023-May-04 • 35 minutes The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 5 Marie Nyswander died in 1986. She’d achieved almost everything she set out to, but she wanted more: even better medications than methadone, fewer regulations, and the holy grail—a cure for addiction. Addiction science has come a long way since Marie’s time, and it turns out, a lot of the field’s earlier assumptions were probably wrong. Neuroscientist Kent Berridge explains why wanting something isn’t the same as liking it. But a cure is still out of our reach |
| 2023-Apr-27 • 1 minutes Reminder about next episode and an update A reminder that our next episode is scheduled to come out next Thursday! In the meantime, we’ve hit a slight snag—Katie has COVID—but she’s resting up, and we’re doing our best to get that episode to you on time. Stay tuned for updates. We'll be back very soon. |
| 2023-Apr-20 • 39 minutes The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 4 Marie thinks she’s finally found a treatment for heroin addiction that will work as a long-term solution, but not everyone agrees—including some of the people she’s trying to help. |
| 2023-Apr-13 • 35 minutes The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 3 After years of disappointing results in her quest to treat heroin addiction, Marie Nyswander was more than ready to try something new. When she met a prominent doctor from the prestigious Rockefeller Institute, they embarked on an experiment that would define both of their careers and revolutionize the treatment of addiction for decades to come. But not everyone was happy about it. |
| 2023-Apr-06 • 28 minutes The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 2 A young psychoanalyst specializing in sexual issues starts getting calls for help – about something else entirely. |
| 2023-Mar-30 • 28 minutes The Doctor and the Fix: Chapter 1 A young doctor looking for adventure abroad is posted to rural Kentucky, where she learns about addiction for the first time—and starts ruffling feathers. |
| 2023-Mar-16 • 2 minutes The Doctor and the Fix: Trailer In 1965, a team of doctors at Rockefeller University announced what sounded like a miracle—they’d found a treatment for heroin addiction that actually seemed to work. For nearly two years, the researchers had been running an experiment with a small group of men, aged 19 to 37, who’d been using heroin for several years—and the results were astonishing. Men who’d been transfixed by heroin cravings for years, who had tried to quit before and failed, were suddenly able to return to their lives. One started pai... |
| 2023-Jan-26 • 24 minutes Of Chestnuts, Cherry Trees, and Mushroom Catsup: Flora Patterson, the Woman who Kept Devastating Blights from U.S. Shores Flora Wambaugh Patterson, a widowed mother of two, played a crucial role in keeping fungal blights from U.S. shores. |
| 2023-Jan-12 • 36 minutes A Complicated Woman: Leona Zacharias A blindness epidemic among premature babies, and a brilliant biologist whose story hits close to home here at Lost Women of Science. |
| 2023-Jan-05 • 2 minutes Introducing Lost Women of Science Shorts: Trailer Our brand new mini-series – 30-minute episodes, each devoted to the story of one overlooked female scientists. |
| 2022-Dec-01 • 28 minutes The Woman Who Knocked Science Sideways A special guest episode from Portraits |
| 2022-Nov-17 • 21 minutes The Feminist Test We Keep Failing There's a test that we at Lost Women of Science seem to fail again and again: the Finkbeiner Test. |
| 2022-Nov-03 • 34 minutes The First Lady of Engineering: An Interview with Y.Y.'s Daughter, Carol Lawson A special guest episode from Our Mothers Ourselves |
| 2022-Oct-13 • 39 minutes The First Lady of Engineering: Chapter 4 YY taught at Tennessee State University for 55 years. We look at her legacy as an engineer, an educator and a mom. And we investigate how HBCUs are training the next generation of Black scientists. |
| 2022-Oct-06 • 37 minutes The First Lady of Engineering: Chapter 3 What did YY actually do as a mechanical engineer? We dive into her work at NASA, and the history of the American space program. |
| 2022-Sep-29 • 35 minutes The First Lady of Engineering: Chapter 2 When YY started college at Howard University, there were three things she swore she’d never do: marry a tall man, become a teacher, and work for the government. But love and life had other plans. |
| 2022-Sep-22 • 35 minutes The First Lady of Engineering: Chapter 1 With her knack for fixing household appliances in early childhood, YY was practically born an engineer. And fortunately, she had a family that nurtured her atypical interest—even when the segregated South made pursuing it almost impossible. |
| 2022-Sep-08 • 2 minutes The First Lady of Engineering: Trailer Yvonne Y. Clark, known as YY throughout her career, has also been nicknamed “The First Lady of Engineering,” because of her groundbreaking achievements as a Black female mechanical engineer. Season 3 of Lost Women of Science traces her trajectory, from her unconventional childhood interest in fixing appliances to civil rights breakthroughs in the segregated South; from her trailblazing role at historically Black colleges and universities to her work at NASA. What can YY teach us about what it means to be th... |
| 2022-Sep-01 • 2 minutes Meet our new cohost! Carol Sutton Lewis, host of the podcast Ground Control Parenting, has long been interested in Black history. This season, she’s joining Lost Women of Science as a cohost to help tell the story of the mechanical engineer, Yvonne Young Clark. Known as Professor Clark to her students and YY to her engineering colleagues, YY’s career spanned academia and industry. She was a dedicated STEM educator and a champion of historically Black colleges and universities. Alongside cohost Katie Hafner, Carol will trace YY’... |
| 2022-Jun-02 • 26 minutes A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: The Weather Myth When we first started researching Klára Dán von Neumann, we thought she was “the computer scientist you should thank for your smartphone's weather app.” It turns out, that’s not true. |
| 2022-Apr-28 • 30 minutes A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: Chapter 5 A new home, a new husband, and a new project. |
| 2022-Apr-21 • 40 minutes A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: Chapter 4 Klári von Neumann enters the Netherworld of computer simulations and postwar Los Alamos. |
| 2022-Apr-14 • 38 minutes A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: Chapter 3 The ENIAC, an early electronic computer, gets a makeover. |
| 2022-Apr-07 • 40 minutes A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: Chapter 2 Klári von Neumann arrives in Princeton just as war breaks out in Europe. |
| 2022-Mar-31 • 38 minutes A Grasshopper in Tall Grass: Chapter 1 Before she entered a world of secrecy, computers and nuclear weapons, who was Klára von Neumann? |
| 2022-Mar-17 • 2 minutes A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass: Trailer The first modern-style code executed on a computer was written in the 1940s by a woman named Klára Dán von Neumann–or Klári to her family and friends. And the historic program she wrote was used to optimize nuclear weapons. This season, we dive into this fascinating moment in postwar America through Klári’s work. We explore the evolution of early computers, the vital role women played in early programming, and the inescapable connection between computing and war. |
| 2021-Dec-23 • 27 minutes The Pathologist in the Basement: The Resignation We investigate the curious, charged circumstances surrounding the resignation of the director of pediatrics at Columbia University's Babies Hospital, and one pathologist at the center of it all: Dorothy Andersen. |
| 2021-Nov-25 • 37 minutes The Pathologist in the Basement: Chapter 4 Dr. Andersen’s legacy creates hope for those living with cystic fibrosis today. |
| 2021-Nov-18 • 29 minutes The Pathologist in the Basement: Chapter 3 A missing portrait of Dr. Andersen takes us on a journey into the perils of memorialization—and who gets to be remembered. |
| 2021-Nov-11 • 39 minutes The Pathologist in the Basement: Chapter 2 The traces Dr. Andersen left behind provide glimpses into her life. |
| 2021-Nov-04 • 31 minutes The Pathologist in the Basement: Chapter 1 While performing an autopsy on the body of a young child, Dr. Dorothy Andersen made a startling discovery. |
| 2021-Oct-20 • 3 minutes The Pathologist in the Basement: Trailer When Dr. Dorothy Andersen confronted a slew of confounding infant deaths, she knew the accepted diagnosis couldn’t be right. Her medical detective work led to our current understanding of Cystic Fibrosis, a disease that circuitously impacts the pancreas and lungs. But she is by no means a household name, and the details of her life get scarcer every day. Who was this scientist, and how did she come to quietly make such an important medical contribution? |
| 2021-Oct-14 • 2 minutes Lost Women of Science: Trailer For every Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin whose story has been told, hundreds of female scientists remain unknown to the public at large. We illuminate the lives and work of a diverse array of groundbreaking scientists who, because of time, place and gender, have gone largely unrecognized. Each season focuses on one scientist, putting her narrative into context, explaining not just the science but also the social and historical conditions in which she lived and worked. We also bring these stories to the p... |