kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_physics-5.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Women in physics	6/6	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_physics	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T04:39:37.430832+00:00	kb-cron

==== 2000s ==== 2001: Lene Hau stopped a beam of light completely 2001: Wendy Freedman and her team published the measured Hubble constant from measurements of the Hubble Space Telescope. 2003: Geophysicist Claudia Alexander oversaw the final stages of Project Galileo, a space exploration mission that ended at the planet Jupiter. Deborah S. Jin and her team were the first to condense pairs of fermionic atoms Physicists Ayşe Erzan, Karimat El-Sayed, Li Fanghua, Mariana Weissmann and Anneke Levelt Sengers win the first L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards in Physical Sciences. Renata Kallosh, in collaboration with Shamit Kachru, Andrei Linde, and Sandip Trivedi, proposes the KKLT mechanism in string theory. 2005: Myriam Sarachik becomes the first woman to win the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize for her contributions to quantum spin dynamics and spin coherence in condensed matter systems, along with David Awschalom and Gabriel Aeppli. 2007: Physicist Ibtesam Badhrees was the first Saudi Arabian woman to become a member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). 2009: Margaret Reid becomes the first woman to win the Moyal Medal fromm Macquarie University, for her In 2019, her work on how to demonstrate the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox using squeezing and parametric down conversion.

==== 2010s ====

2011: Taiwanese-American astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma led a team of scientists in discovering two of the largest black holes ever observed. 2012: Mildred Dresselhaus becomes the first female laureate of the Kavli Prize in Nanosciences "for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures". 2013: Nashwa Eassa founded the NGO Sudanese Women in Sciences. 2014: American theoretical physicist Shirley Anne Jackson was awarded the National Medal of Science. Jackson had been the first African-American woman to receive a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the early 1970s, and the first woman to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 2014: Amanda Barnard becomes the first woman to win the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for her computational simulations on diamond nanoparticles. 2016: Fabiola Gianotti became the first woman Director-General of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) 2018: Astrophysicists Hiranya Peiris and Joanna Dunkley and Italian cosmologist Licia Verde were among 27 scientists awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their contributions to "detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies". Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell received the special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her scientific achievements and "inspiring leadership", worth $3 million. She donated the entirety of the prize money towards the creation of scholarships to assist women, underrepresented minorities and refugees who are pursuing the study of physics. Physicist Donna Strickland received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics"; she shared it with Arthur Ashkin and Gérard Mourou. For the first time in history, women received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Prize in Physics in the same year. Human right activist and physicist Narges Mohammadi wins the Andrei Sakharov prize by the American Physical Society, "for her leadership in campaigning for peace, justice, and the abolition of the death penalty and for her unwavering efforts to promote the human rights and freedoms of the Iranian people, despite persecution that has forced her to suspend her scientific pursuits and endure lengthy incarceration." Ewine van Dishoeck becomes the first female laureate of the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics for "her combined contributions to observational, theoretical, and laboratory astrochemistry, elucidating the life cycle of interstellar clouds and the formation of stars and planets" 2019: Mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win the Abel Prize for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." 2020: Andrea M. Ghez received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy." She shared half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel, while the other half was awarded to Roger Penrose. Geoscientist Ingeborg Levin was the first woman to receive the Alfred Wegener medal from the European Geosciences Union "for fundamental contributions to our present knowledge and understanding of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including the global carbon cycle." Françoise Combes becomes the first female astrophysicist to win the CNRS Gold Medal, highest degree in research by the French government.

==== 2020s ==== 2022: Anne L'Huillier becomes the second female scientist to receive the Wolf Prize in Physics "for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics". 2022: Astronomer Ewine van Dishoeck is awarded the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal. 2023: Professor Polina Bayvel becomes the first woman to win the Rumford Medal by the Royal Society. 2023: Anne l'Huillier receives the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for "experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter" shared with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz. 2025: Julia Yeomans becomes the first female laureate of the Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics.

== See also == Timeline of women in science Timeline of women in science in the United States Women in NASA Women in science Women in the workforce

== References ==