---
title: "Timeline of women in science"
chunk: 14/16
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"
---

=== 2000s ===
2000: Venezuelan astrophysicist Kathy Vivas presented her discovery of approximately 100 "new and very distant" RR Lyrae stars, providing insight into the structure and history of the Milky Way galaxy.
2003: American geophysicist Claudia Alexander oversaw the final stages of Project Galileo, a space exploration mission that ended at the planet Jupiter.
2004: American biologist Linda B. Buck received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Richard Axel "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system".
2006: Chilean biochemist Cecilia Hidalgo Tapia became the first woman to receive the Chilean National Prize for Natural Sciences.
2006: Chinese-American biochemist Yizhi Jane Tao led a team of researchers to become the first to map the atomic structure of Influenza A, contributing to antiviral research.
2006: Parasitologist Susan Lim became the first Malaysian scientist elected to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.
2006: Merieme Chadid became the first Moroccan person and the first female astronomer to travel to Antarctica, leading an international team of scientists in the installation of a major observatory in the South Pole.
2006: American computer scientist Frances E. Allen won the Turing Award for "pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution". She was the first woman to win the award.
2006: Canadian-American computer scientist Maria Klawe became the president of Harvey Mudd College.
2007: Using satellite imagery, Egyptian geomorphologist Eman Ghoneim discovered traces of an 11,000-year-old mega lake in the Sahara Desert. The discovery shed light on the origins of the largest modern groundwater reservoir in the world.
2007: Physicist Ibtesam Badhrees was the first Saudi Arabian woman to become a member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
2008: French virologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Harald zur Hausen and Luc Montagnier, "for their discovery of HIV, human immunodeficiency virus".
2008: American-born Australian Penny Sackett became Australia's first female chief scientist.
2008: American computer scientist Barbara Liskov won the Turing Award for "contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing".
2009: American molecular biologist Carol W. Greider received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase".
2009: Israeli crystallographer Ada E. Yonath, along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".
2009: Chinese geneticist Zeng Fanyi and her research team published their experiment results proving that induced pluripotent stem cells can be used to generate whole mammalian bodies – in this case, live mice.