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On International Women's Day, we celebrate the outstanding women in the WIRED world. In the first of our round-ups, we highlighted the females blazing a trail in business and culture. Now, we celebrate the women of science. Each of these inspirational females is speaking at this year's Starmus IV festival in Trondheim, Norway in June. On International Women's Day, WIRED highlights the females changing the world
Read more about the discoveries and contributions to neuroscience, physics, astrophysics, astronomy and biology made by female scientists across the world.
As Norwegian professor of neuroscience and founding director of the Center for Neural Computation, May is interested in how spatial location and spatial memory are computed in the brain. Her work includes the discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, which provides clues to a neural mechanism for the metric of spatial mapping. Moser was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014, together with long-term collaborator Edvard Moser and John OKeefe for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. Moser is also co-director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
Bailey is a British psychiatrist and academic who specialises in children's mental health. Since 2004 she has been professor of child mental health at the University of Central Lancashire. In 1993, Bailey appeared as an expert witness in the James Bulger murder trial. She established that one of Bulger's killers, Jon Venables, knew the difference between right and wrong: information that led to them being convicted of murder. In the 2002 Queen's Birthday Honours, Bailey was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) "for services to Youth Justice" and in the 2014 she was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) "for services to psychiatry and for voluntary service to people with mental health conditions".
Professor Sara Seager is a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been a pioneer in the world of exoplanets and her groundbreaking research ranges from the detection of exoplanet atmospheres to innovative theories about life on other worlds and the development of novel space mission concepts. She is known for inventing the method used to study exoplanet atmospheres today. Dubbed an "astronomical Indiana Jones", Seager is on a quest for the discovery of a true Earth twin.
Hayhoe's work has resulted in more than 120 peer-reviewed publications that evaluate global climate model performance, develop and compare downscaling approaches, and quantify the impacts of climate change on cities, states, ecosystems, and sectors over the coming century. She has been named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People and the Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers, as well as one of Politico's 50 thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming American politics.
Born and raised in India, Natarajan received undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics at MIT. Now a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale, Natarajan is recognised for her seminal contributions to the study of dark matter and the formation and growth of black holes.
Best known for her role in deciphering the molecular mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas9, Charpentier's lab discovered that Cas9 could be used to make cuts in any DNA sequence desired. Charpentier has been awarded several international prizes, awards, and acknowledgments including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Gruber Foundation International Prize in Genetics and the Leibniz Prize.
The director of the SETI Institute Carl Sagan Centre since August 2015, Cabrol is currently developing a new, multidisciplinary, roadmap to bridge astrobiology and the SETI search. She counts more than 470 peer-reviewed publications and proceedings of professional conferences.
Selected to the Nasa astronaut corps in 1996, Dr Magnus flew in space on the STS-112 shuttle mission in 2002, and on the final shuttle flight, STS-135, in 2011. In addition, she flew to the International Space Station on STS-126 in November 2008, served as flight engineer and science officer on Expedition 18, andreturned home on STS-119 after four and a half months on board. Following her assignment on Station, she served at NASA Headquarters in the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Her last duty at NASA, after STS-135, was as the deputy chief of the Astronaut Office.
Dr Magnus has received numerous awards, including the Nasa Space Flight Medal, the Nasa Distinguished Service Medal, the Nasa Exceptional Service Medal, and the 40 at 40 Award (given to former collegiate women athletes to recognize the impact of Title IX).
Starmus IV, hosted by NTNU, runs from June 18 to June 23 in Trondheim, Norway, tickets available from http://www.starmus.com.
Excerpt from:
Women in science: celebrating the leading females in physics, chemistry and beyond - Wired.co.uk