Lost Women of Science Initiative

🦋What is the Matilda Effect? And is it affecting you? This week on Lost Women of Science we are re-airing episode 2 of our inaugural season on Dr. Dorothy Andersen. LWoS interviews science historian Margaret Rossiter, who coined the term “Matilda Effect” to describe how credit for work done by female scientists too often goes to their male colleagues. We examine how this affected Dorothy Andersen and her groundbreaking research into cystic fibrosis. Listen to the episode on Spotify: https://buff.ly/3P8Wtij Listen on Apple: https://buff.ly/3wDqT5O #lostwomenofsci #womeninstem

May is Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month. It’s also the birth month of Dr. Dorothy Andersen, who first identified the disease in 1938. We’re revisiting our 2021 inaugural Lost Women of Science season in her honor. This week we have The Question Mark, and we go back to the 1930s, when Dr. Andersen was confronted with a slew of confounding infant deaths... Listen to the full episode at the link in our bio. #womeninscience #cysticfibrosis #lostwomenofsci

 🤯When poet Jessy Randall started researching the lives of female scientists, she became angry. The team at Lost Women of Science can certainly relate. Female scientists rarely got the recognition they deserved for the many important discoveries they have made. But do the women who are the firsts in their fields want that label? In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, Randall talks to Carol Sutton Lewis about Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science, the collection of poems born out of that anger. They discuss what it means to be the first in a field, the ethics of poetic license, and the importance of female role models in STEM. Randall’s poems are about some of the women we’ve featured in our podcast, including the first Black female doctor, Rebecca Lee Crumpler, and physicist Lise Meitner. Listen to the full episode at the link in our bio! #lostwomenofsci #womeninstem 

“We were each put on earth to torment the other,” says cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Elizabeth Bates, a psychologist, who challenged the prevailing theory about how humans acquire language. This week on Lost Women of Science we discover the fascinating career of Liz Bates, a young psychologist who disputed a popular theory of how we acquire language, launching a debate that continues today. Bates thought that language emerges from interactions between our brains and our environments and challenged formidable linguists like Pinker and Noam Chomsky, placing herself at the center of a heated debate that remains unresolved half a century later. Listen to the full episode here: https://buff.ly/3wDqT5O #lostwomenofsci #chomsky #linguists

This week on Lost Women of Science we learn about Melba Phillips, who grew up on a farm in Indiana at the turn of the twentieth century. She was one of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s first graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. Together they discovered the Oppenheimer-Phillips Process, which explained a particular kind of nuclear reaction. In this episode, we explain what that is, with a little help from generative AI. Listen to the full episode at the link in our bio. #lostwomenofsci #oppenheimer

🎉Congratulations to author, Maria Smilios. Her book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis, won a Christopher Award! It is one of 12 books for adults and young people, as the Christopher Awards program marks its 75th year. Smilios relates the untold story of the African American nurses from the South who moved to New York during the Great Depression to care for tuberculosis (TB) patients and help find a cure for the contagious disease. Before antibiotics, TB killed one out of every seven people. Lost Women of Science featured Maria in an episode recently called Lost Women of Science Conversations: The Fight Against Tuberculosis. The Christopher Awards celebrate works that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” We couldn’t agree more that Maria’s work represents the best side of human nature. Make sure to listen to our episode featuring Maria at the link in our bio! #lostwomenofsci #womeninstem #womeninscience

☀️🌝Did you catch the solar eclipse yesterday and it left you wanting to know more about the universe and astronomy? This week on Lost Women of Science we are continuing the astronomy theme with one of our favorite episodes on astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who figured out what the stars are made of. Both she and her groundbreaking findings were ahead of their time. Cecilia turned astronomy on its head but few believed what she had discovered. Listen to the full episode at the link in our bio! #lostwomenofsci #womeninstem #eclipse

In North America on April 8 we are experiencing a solar eclipse, so this week on Lost Women of Science we learn about Annie Maunder, who was fascinated by the secrets of the sun and was determined to travel the globe and unlock them. Annie's observations led to our greater understanding of how the sun affects the earth, but like so many early female scientists, her contributions and achievements have been forgotten. So this week, we’re shining a light on her story to learn about her discoveries and her life. Listen to the episode at the link in our bio!#lostwomenofsci #womeninstem #podcast

New episode out now! Lost Women of Science talks to historian Catherine McNeur about how she rediscovered the lives and work of Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris, two scientists who significantly contributed to botany and entomology in the mid-19th Century. Elizabeth collected rare plant species and sent them to institutions worldwide, and Margaretta helped farmers combat the pests that were devastating their fields. These women were lost to history; McNeur tells us how that happened, piece by piece, and how she recovered their stories. Listen at the link in our bio. #podcast #lostwomenofsci #womeninsci #womeninstem

🎉This month marks an important milestone for Lost Women of Science. We’ve hit one million podcast downloads! 🥳 🙏We want to thank you, our listeners, and everyone on the Lost Women of Science team - producers, engineers, marketing/promotional team, administrative staff, our Advisory Board, and our wonderful funders. 👩🔬And of course, thank you to all the wonderful female scientists whose stories we have told. It’s been a terrific journey. And keep listening! There are so many more great female scientists to celebrate!  #lostwomenofsci #womeninstem #sciencepodcast