Lise Meitner

The double challenge: being a female scientist and being a scientist woman.

Nereide Rudas

Medicine as a utopia: relationship, liberation, vision.

WANGARI MUTA MAATHAI

[Ihithe, 1940 – Nairobi, 2011] Kenyan environmentalist and activist. In 2004 she was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was a Kenyan parliamentarian and Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources in the government of President Mwai Kibaki, between January 2003 and November 2005.

LUCIANA NISSIM MOMIGLIANO

[Turin, 1919 – Milan, 1998] Pediatrician, psychoanalyst, partisan and former deportee from Nazi concentration camps. Despite being from a Jewish family, he managed to graduate in Medicine in 1943, as the fascist racial laws allowed those already enrolled to complete their university studies. Thanks to her medical degree she managed to survive the concentration camps where she was interned.

CHIEN-SHIUNG WU

[Shanghai, 1912 – New York, 1997] Chinese physicist, she carried out his research activity mainly in the United States. She participated in the Manhattan project and was among the first women to occupy a prominent place in the panorama of world physics in the twentieth century. She was the first winner of the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1978, for conducting the experiment that bears her name.

EVA MAMELI CALVINO

[Sassari, 1886 – Sanremo, 1978] Botany and naturalist, she was the first woman in Italy to obtain a teaching qualification in botany, in 1915, at the University of Cagliari. From 1926 to 1929 she directed the Botanical Garden of the University of Cagliari, before returning to carry out research at the Experimental Floriculture Station of Sanremo. Silver medal of merit of the Italian Red Cross and Bronze medal of civil valor.

MARYAM MIRZAKHANI

[Tehran, 1977 – Stanford, 2017] Iranian mathematician, she mainly carried out research in the field of geometry. Professor of mathematics at Stanford University since 2008, in 2014 she was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, as well as the first person of Iranian citizenship to receive this recognition.

MARIE ANNE PIERRETTE PAULZE LAVOISIER

[Montbrison, 1758 – Paris, 1836] French chemist, she actively collaborated in the experiments of her husband, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and, with her notes and drawings of the experimental apparatus used, she contributed to making her contemporaries understand her methods and results. Subsequently, she continued to disseminate his works and recover his notes and laboratory instruments.