---
title: "Timeline of women in science"
chunk: 12/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women_in_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:04:23.558030+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

1960: British primatologist Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in Tanzania; her study of them continued for over 50 years. Her observations challenged previous ideas that only humans made tools and that chimpanzees had a basically vegetarian diet.
Early 1960s: German-Canadian metallurgist Ursula Franklin studied levels of radioactive isotope strontium-90 that were appearing in the teeth of children as a side effect of nuclear weapons testing fallout. Her research influenced the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
1960s: American mathematician Katherine Johnson calculated flight paths at NASA for crewed space flights.
1961: Indian chemist Asima Chatterjee became the first female recipient of a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize. She was recognized in the Chemical Sciences category for her contributions to phytomedicine.
1962: Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.
1962: South African botanist Margaret Levyns became the first female president of the Royal Society of South Africa.
1962: French physicist Marguerite Perey became the first female Fellow elected to the Académie des Sciences.
1963: Elsa G. Vilmundardóttir became the first female Icelandic geologist, completing her studies at Stockholm University.
1963: Maria Goeppert Mayer became the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics; she shared the prize with J. Hans D. Jensen "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure" and Eugene Paul Wigner "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".
1964: American mathematician Irene Stegun completed the work which led to the publication of Handbook of Mathematical Functions, a widely used and widely cited reference work in applied mathematics.
1964: British chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances".
1964: Scottish virologist June Almeida made the first identification of a human coronavirus.
1965: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to receive a Ph.D. in computer science. Her thesis was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns".
1966: Japanese immunologist Teruko Ishizaka, working with Kimishige Ishizaka, discovered the antibody class Immunoglobulin E (IgE).
1966: Serbian astrophysicist Mirjana Vukićević-Karabin founded the School of Astrophysics at the University of Belgrade
1967: British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell co-discovered the first radio pulsars.
1967: Sue Arnold became the first female British Geological Survey person to go to sea on a research vessel.
1967: South African radiobiologist Tikvah Alper discovered that scrapie, an infectious brain disease affecting sheep, did not spread via DNA or RNA like a viral or bacterial disease. The discovery enabled scientists to better understand diseases caused by prions.
1967: Yvonne Brill, a Canadian-American rocket and jet propulsion engineer, invented the hydrazine resistojet propulsion system.
1968: Japanese pioneer of molecular biology Tsuneko Okazaki studied DNA replication and discovered Okazaki fragments.
1969: Beris Cox became the first female paleontologist in the British Geological Survey.
1969: Ukrainian-born astronomer Svetlana Gerasimenko co-discovered the 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet.

=== 1970s ===
1970: Dorothy Hill became the first female president of the Australian Academy of Science.
1970: Samira Islam became the first Saudi Arabian person to earn a PhD in pharmacology.
1970: Astronomer Vera Rubin published the first evidence for dark matter.
1970: Polish geologist Franciszka Szymakowska became widely known because of her unique and detailed geological drawings that are still used today.
1973: American physicist Anna Coble became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in biophysics, completing her dissertation at University of Illinois.
1974: Dominican marine biologist Idelisa Bonnelly founded the Dominican Republic Academy of Science.
1975: Indian chemist Asima Chatterjee was elected the General President of the Indian Science Congress Association. She simultaneously became the first female scientist ever elected a member of the congress.
1975: Indian geneticist Archana Sharma received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, the first female recipient in the Biological Sciences category.
1975: Female officers of the British Geological Survey no longer had to resign upon getting married.
1975: Chien-Shiung Wu became the first female president of the American Physical Society.
1976: Filipino-American microbiologist Roseli Ocampo-Friedmann traveled to the Antarctic with Imre Friedmann and discovered micro-organisms living within the porous rock of the Ross Desert. These organisms – cryptoendoliths – were observed surviving extremely low temperatures and humidity, assisting scientific research into the possibility of life on Mars.
1976: Margaret Burbidge was named the first female president of the American Astronomical Society.
1977: American medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones" along with Roger Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally who received it "for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain".
1977: Friederike Victoria Joy Adamson (née Gessner, 20 January 1910 – 3 January 1980) was a naturalist, artist and author. Her book, Born Free, an international bestseller, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. It was made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.
1977: The Association for Women Geoscientists was founded.
1977: Argentine-Canadian scientist Veronica Dahl became the first graduate at Université d'Aix-Marseille II (and one of the first women in the world) to earn a PhD in artificial intelligence.
1977: Canadian-American Elizabeth Stern published her research on the link between birth control pills – which contained high levels of estrogen at the time – and the increased risk of cervical cancer development in women. Her data helped pressure the pharmaceutical industry into providing safer contraceptive pills with lower hormone doses.
1978: Anna Jane Harrison became the first female president of the American Chemical Society.
1978: Mildred Cohn served as the first female president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, then called the American Society of Biological Chemists.

=== 1980s ===