Stories of STEM women that deserve to be told—all year long

Boost Her Voice #1—amplifying the untold stories of women in STEM

Every year, Women’s Day comes and goes. The flowers wilt, the chocolates are forgotten, and the keynote speeches fade. HR newsletters get archived, diversity pledges stall, and gender equality waits—again. We try to fit the struggles, triumphs, and contributions of women into a single day.We celebrate, reflect, and make promises—only to move on the next morning. But real change doesn’t happen in a day.

That’s why I launched Boost Her Voice after Women’s Day 2025.

For the next year, I will share the stories of 12 exceptional women in STEM every Monday.Women whose innovations, discoveries, and leadership shaped the world—but too often went unrecognized.

Because one day isn’t enough. These stories deserve to be told—all year long.

Let's meet the first 12 women:

Ada Lovelace: The first programmer—before computers even existed

What happens when the daughter of a poet father and an anti-romanticism mother is raised to reject imagination? She turns numbers into visions of the future. Ada Lovelace wasn’t meant to dream. After her father, Lord Byron, abandoned the family, her mother was determined to erase poetry from Ada’s life, replacing it with rigorous studies in mathematics and logic. But in the process, she unknowingly built something extraordinary—a woman who could see patterns where others saw only numbers.

At 27, she worked alongside Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine. While others saw a machine for calculations, she saw a machine capable of more—of processing symbols, creating, and shaping the future of technology. She wrote the first algorithm before the world even had a computer. A century before artificial intelligence, she imagined machines that could think. But she was dismissed. Her ideas were too bold, too imaginative, too ahead of their time. Her work remained in the shadows, her vision ignored.

Today? She has a side note as the first computer programmer. She died tragically young at 36, burdened by financial struggles and the complexities of balancing a traditional marriage with three children and her deep passion for science. Her groundbreaking work on the Analytical Engine was largely ignored during her lifetime.

Her work wasn’t just ahead of its time—it was dismissed, overshadowed, and forgotten. She didn’t wait for recognition. She built the future despite being silenced by history.

Her legacy was never fully realized while she was alive, and even today, we are still playing catch-up in understanding the true depth of her genius. Her contributions weren’t just theoretical—they were the blueprint for the world we live in. But what would have happened if Ada were born in the AI age?

Margaret Hamilton: Her software saved Apollo 11 from disaster.

She wasn’t a pilot. She didn’t wear a spacesuit. She never set foot on the moon. And yet, when the Apollo 11 astronauts were minutes away from landing, it was Margaret Hamilton’s software that kept them alive.

In the 1960s, before “software engineering” was even a term, Margaret was leading the team at MIT writing code for NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer. Back then, people thought programming was just clerical work. Margaret? She was engineering the future of computing itself. Then came July 20, 1969. The moment of truth. As the lunar module approached the moon, its computer overloaded, throwing error messages. Mission control held its breath. Neil Armstrong had seconds to react. But Margaret had planned for this. She had designed the software to recognize when the system was overwhelmed—and instead of crashing, it prioritized the most critical functions. The fix? Already in place. The landing? Safe. No Margaret, no moon landing.

Her code didn’t just guide Apollo 11—it laid the foundation for modern software development. She pioneered priority-based computing, asynchronous execution, and human-in-the-loop decision-making—concepts that power today’s technology. She even coined the term "software engineering”, fighting for it to be seen as a legitimate field. At the time, it wasn’t. Now? It runs the world.

NASA didn’t rush to recognize her. The history books didn’t write her in. It took until 2016 for her to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Decades late, but well deserved. Margaret wasn’t waiting for recognition—she was too busy writing the future, one line of code at a time.

Katalin Karikó: Ignored for decades—until her research saved millions.

Being told you’re wrong is one thing. Being told your life’s work is useless? That’s what Katalin Karikó heard for 40 years. In the 1990s, Katalin was convinced that messenger RNA (mRNA) could be the key to medical breakthroughs. The scientific community? Not so much. She was denied funding. Demoted. Pushed out of research institutions.

But she didn’t stop.

Katalin knew that if she could stabilize mRNA, it could be used to instruct the body to fight diseases—from cancer to viruses. No injections of weakened viruses. No outdated vaccine methods. Just the body learning to heal itself. She spent decades fighting for an idea no one believed in—until 2020. When COVID-19 hit, the world scrambled for a vaccine. Suddenly, her research was the answer. The mRNA technology she pioneered became the foundation of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, saving millions of lives worldwide. For decades, the world dismissed her work. But science doesn’t care about rejection letters.

In 2023, she won the Nobel Prize in Medicine—recognition that arrived nearly half a century late. Katalin wasn’t chasing prestige. She wasn’t chasing titles. She was chasing one thing only: the truth.

Jennifer Doudna: She co-created CRISPR, a gene-editing tool.

Imagine holding a tool that can rewrite the blueprint of life itself. That’s exactly what Jennifer Doudna helped create. It started with a curiosity about bacteria. While studying how they defend themselves against viruses, Jennifer and her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier uncovered something revolutionary—CRISPR.

A natural defense system turned into a genetic editing tool. With CRISPR, scientists could cut, edit, and rewrite DNA with surgical precision. The potential? Curing genetic diseases. Eliminating inherited disorders. Reshaping medicine. But power like this comes with consequences.

The moment CRISPR entered the world, so did ethical debates. If we can edit life, where do we draw the line? Should we erase diseases—or design the “perfect” human”? Jennifer became more than a scientist—she became a voice in one of the biggest ethical debates in modern science. The technology is there. The question is, how far should we go? In 2020, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, solidifying her place in history. But the conversation is still evolving—because CRISPR isn’t just about changing genes. It’s about changing the future.

Katie Bouman: A black hole was just a theory—until 2019.

For over a century, black holes were just an idea. Einstein predicted them. Scientists debated them. But no one had actually seen one. Then came Katie Bouman. At just 29 years old, she led the team that built the algorithm capable of stitching together the first-ever image of a black hole—a breakthrough once thought impossible. The challenge? You can’t just “take a picture” of a black hole. It’s 55 million light-years away, and it absorbs light itself. The data had to be reconstructed, piece by piece, from telescopes around the world.

Katie’s algorithm processed 5,000 trillion bytes of data, transforming radio signals into an image that proved black holes weren’t just theorized—they were real. But the moment should have been pure celebration, it wasn’t. Instead of recognizing her work, some corners of the internet tried to discredit her contribution, questioning whether she deserved the spotlight at all.

Here’s the reality: Katie never claimed to do it alone. She led the imaging team, one of many groups that made the project possible. The problem wasn’t her—it was that women in STEM often have to “prove” their contributions in ways men never do.

But the picture spoke for itself. She didn’t just help capture a black hole—she exposed the biases that still exist in science.

Rosalind Franklin: Her X-ray images cracked DNA’s code.

The discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure changed biology forever. The credit? It went to Watson and Crick. The data that made it possible? That was Rosalind Franklin’s. She wasn’t in it for the fame. She was in it for the science. A chemist by training, she mastered X-ray crystallography, a technique that allowed scientists to see molecular structures. In 1952, she captured Photograph 51—the clearest image of DNA’s structure at the time.

And then, without her knowledge, the image was shared with Watson and Crick. What happened next is in every biology textbook—except her part of the story. Watson and Crick rushed to publish their findings, winning the Nobel Prize in 1962, while Rosalind was left in the shadows. She died of cancer in 1958, never knowing how her work had been used. She wasn’t included in the Nobel. She wasn’t properly credited. Even Watson himself later mocked her in his memoirs, downplaying her role.

But without Rosalind Franklin, there would be no DNA model.

Science moved forward on the foundation she built, even as history erased her name. Now, it’s time to change that. It’s time to tell her story—and give her the credit she deserved.

Timnit Gebru: She exposed AI bias—and got fired for it.

Imagine being one of the brightest minds in AI—only to be told to stay quiet when your research challenges the status quo. That’s exactly what happened to Timnit Gebru. As one of the leading voices in ethical AI, she was at the forefront of research exposing racial and gender bias in artificial intelligence. Her work revealed how AI systems—trained on biased data—reinforced discrimination, from facial recognition misidentifying Black people to hiring algorithms favoring men over women. And then came 2020. Timnit, then co-leading Google’s Ethical AI team, co-authored a research paper that raised critical concerns about large language models (yes, the same technology behind ChatGPT). She warned that unchecked AI development could cause social and environmental harm—and urged the industry to act responsibly. Google’s response? They told her to retract the paper. She refused. They fired her.

Instead of staying silent, she built something bigger. Timnit went on to co-found the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), an independent space dedicated to developing AI that serves people—not corporate profits. She became a global advocate for ethical tech, forcing the AI industry to confront what it wanted to ignore. She didn’t just expose bias in AI—she exposed bias in the entire system.

Fei-Fei Li: She trained AI to see like humans.

Before AI could recognize faces, objects, or emotions—Fei-Fei Li had to teach it how.

In the early 2000s, AI models were clumsy. They struggled to distinguish a cat from a table, let alone understand the world like humans do. Fei-Fei had a vision: train AI on massive amounts of images—just like a child learns through experience. She led the creation of ImageNet, a dataset of over 14 million labeled images, which became the foundation for modern computer vision. Every self-driving car, facial recognition system, and AI-powered medical scan owes something to her work.

But her influence didn’t stop at research. As the first woman to direct Stanford’s AI Lab, Fei-Fei pushed for more diversity in artificial intelligence, challenging the male-dominated field. She’s also been a fierce advocate for “human-centered AI”—technology that serves people, not just profits. While the world races toward more powerful AI, she keeps asking the bigger question: How do we make AI ethical, fair, and beneficial for all? Because training AI to see is one thing. Teaching it to be responsible? That’s the real challenge.

Patricia Bath: She gave sight back to millions.

Restoring sight wasn’t just her profession—it was her mission. As an ophthalmologist (a doctor specializing in eye health and vision care), Patricia Bath saw something others ignored: Black patients were twice as likely to suffer from blindness. Not because of biology—but because of unequal access to eye care. She wasn’t just a doctor. She was a problem solver.

One of the biggest causes of blindness? Cataracts—clouding of the eye’s lens that blocks vision. It was a common but devastating condition, and existing treatments were risky. In 1986, she invented the Laserphaco Probe, a laser-based surgical device that removed cataracts with precision and minimal damage. Before this, cataract surgery was done manually with a blade, increasing the risk of complications. And the result? She gave sight back to millions.

She became the first Black woman to receive a medical patent—but the recognition didn’t come easily. Like so many women in STEM, her work was overlooked, her contributions downplayed. But her legacy isn’t in the awards—it’s in the eyes that can see today because she refused to accept the status quo. Because when Patricia saw a problem, she didn’t blink. She changed the world instead.

Dorothy Vaughan: NASA’s hidden genius.

Before computers had keyboards and screens, NASA had human computers—mathematicians who manually crunched numbers for space missions. Dorothy Vaughan was one of them. But she wasn’t just solving equations—she was leading the way for future generations. In the 1940s, she joined NACA (NASA’s predecessor) as a human computer, working on complex flight calculations. But there was a catch—she was placed in a segregated unit. Black women worked separately from white mathematicians, with fewer resources and opportunities. Did she wait for the rules to change? No. Dorothy became NASA’s first Black female supervisor, fighting for her team to receive the same respect and pay as their white counterparts. And when electronic computers arrived, threatening to replace human computers, she saw the shift before anyone else.

She taught herself and her team to code in FORTRAN, one of the earliest programming languages. When NASA transitioned to digital computing, she and her team were already ahead. Her work powered the Apollo missions, satellite launches, and the future of NASA itself. But for decades, her name remained unknown—until Hidden Figures finally brought her story to light. She wasn’t just a mathematician. She was a leader, a mentor, and a pioneer who refused to be left behind.

Hedy Lamarr: A Hollywood star who shaped modern tech.

By day, she was a Hollywood actress, celebrated for her beauty. By night, she was an inventor, designing the technology that would one day power Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. Most people knew Hedy Lamarr for her on-screen presence. Few realized that behind the glamour was a mind years ahead of its time.

During World War II, she co-developed frequency-hopping technology, a system designed to stop enemy forces from jamming torpedo signals. The idea? Switch radio frequencies in a way that was impossible to track. The U.S. Navy dismissed her invention. A woman? An actress? They told her to stick to entertaining the troops. Decades later, her work became the foundation of modern wireless communication. The tech they ignored is now in every smartphone, Wi-Fi router, and GPS system in the world. She was never paid. She was never credited. She wasn’t recognized as an inventor until she was in her 80s. Hedy Lamarr didn’t just break stereotypes—she shattered them.

Tu Youyou: She found a cure hidden in ancient texts.

Malaria was killing millions. Every known treatment was failing. For years, scientists searched for a solution—but they were looking in the wrong place. Tu Youyou, a Chinese pharmacologist, took a different approach. Instead of relying solely on modern medicine, she searched through 2,000-year-old medical texts, looking for forgotten knowledge.

She found a clue in an ancient Chinese remedy using sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua). The challenge? Turning it into a reliable, scientifically tested treatment. She and her team screened over 380 herbal extracts before finally isolating artemisinin—the compound that would go on to become the world’s most effective malaria drug.

It wasn’t easy. She was given no advanced lab, no funding, no international recognition. She even tested the drug on herself before moving to human trials. The result? Millions of lives saved. Decades later, in 2015, she became the first Chinese woman to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine—without a PhD, without a Western degree, and without ever chasing fame.

Her work didn’t just cure a disease. It proved that science’s greatest breakthroughs can come from looking back as well as forward.

What a time travel, isn’t it? Across centuries, continents, and disciplines, these women shaped the world—often without the credit they deserved. From medicine to space, AI to genetics, computing to communications, their impact is everywhere.

And this was only 12 stories out of 624. Read on in the next editions to be even more amazed and see how extraordinary women in STEM are shaping our future—every single day.

Thanks to Instant Power for sponsoring the series—because visibility is not optional. Hard work whispers, stories amplify.