Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of celebration that helps people learn about the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths, inspiring others and creating new role models. We asked editors at Nature Research to talk about female scientists who’ve made major contributions to their fields.

If you’d like to tell us about a scientist who’s inspired you, get in touch with @nresearchnews and we’ll share some of our favourite tweets.

This is the final blog from of a three-part series which celebrate this milestone.  Here are parts 1 and part 2. You can read more about Ada Lovelace’s legacy here.

Rosy Favicchio, Associate Editor, Nature Biomedical Engineering

 Biomedical engineering is a field with the prerogative of solving problems in healthcare and is usually associated with advanced high-tech and best-in-class facilities. Rarely does the majority of the population benefit from what only wealth can buy.

Great women here come few and far between. Rebecca Richards-Kortum has managed not only to excel as a bioengineer, but is making a world leader in what I consider the most challenging aspect of global health: the delivery of point-of-care diagnostic solutions in low-resource settings.

Providing real-time diagnosis and treatment of cervical cancers as well as the early detection of oral and bladder cancers, making the methods less expensive to implement, takes more than good will. It is rather a feat of understanding cultures with diverse values such as those found in sub-Saharan Africa, it takes convincing people to care, and it takes guts. Rebecca is a 2016 MacArthur fellow, rightly deserved.

 Madelena Helmer, Senior Editor, Nature

3D printing can turn complex computer designs into highly functional real-world objects, and the lab headed by Jennifer Lewis is responsible for many enabling developments and innovations that may transform manufacturing as we know it in a number of different fields.

With engineering and manufacturing still male-dominated, Jennifer Lewis inspires by simply – and impressively – getting on with the job of exploring basic materials science, fluid handling and robotic assembly so that 3D printing can create functional, structural and biological materials with unusual properties.

This ranges from different cells printed onto chips to create artificial organs that can serve as a powerful new platform for disease modelling and drug screening; to the realization of octobot, the first soft-bodied robot that is completely self-contained.

So uplifting to think of these accomplishments when coming across James Brown crooning that it is a man’s, man’s, man’s world!

You can read a Review Jennifer Lewis co-authored in Nature here: Printing soft matter in three dimensions (free-to-access link via SharedIt).

Jung-Eun Lee, Associate Editor, Communications Biology

It feels timely to honour Amita Sehgal for her contribution to the development of the circadian clock and sleep fields this year, when the Nobel Prize for Physiology was awarded to three circadian biologists, including Michael Young.

Dr Sehgal began her postdoctoral fellowship at Rockefeller University in the laboratory of Micheal Young, where she discovered the second circadian clock mutation timeless, and cloned its gene.  Her research group identified the action mechanisms of Timeless as a time-resetting component of the circadian clock, which keeps our physiological rhythms at 24-hr period.  The Sehgal group also has been at the forefront in discovering numerous sleep genes, helping us understand why we need to sleep. Explore further here, here, and here.

Dr Sehgal has produced 43 trainees, twelve of whom became prominent women investigators and six of whom the women leads in various industry.  It is much anticipated that she will continue to inspire more women scientists.

 Silvia Milana, Associate Editor and Team Manager, Nature Communications

Owing to my academic background in Raman spectroscopy of graphene, I have been deeply inspired by Prof Mildred Dresselhaus (1930-2017), the “Queen of Carbon Science”, who made outstanding contributions to the physics of fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and graphene. She pioneered Raman spectroscopy as a sensitive tool for the characterization of carbon-based nanomaterials. Millie was a true leader in championing a more significant role for women in science.

She co-founded the Women’s Forum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and encouraged women to pursue a career in physics, engineering and related fields of research that were traditionally male-dominated. When Millie arrived at MIT in 1960, the percentage of women amounted to just 4% of the overall undergraduate student population. The female presence today is 40%. Besides being an exceptional scientist, for me, Millie was also a gateway to precious personal stories and anecdotes about Enrico Fermi, whom she met at the University of Chicago.

Fabio Pulizzi, Chief Editor, Nature Nanotechnology

A few years ago, some colleagues and I were organising a conference on the applications of graphene. We had to choose a distinguished scientist to give the opening address. We all immediately agreed on one name – the MIT professor, Mildred Dresselhaus.

Mildred Dresselhaus, or Millie as she was known, was an inspiration to many. Born in 1930, she had, through intelligence and determination, risen to the forefront of solid-state physics by the 1960s, when the field was decidedly male dominated. She contributed to our understanding of carbon in all forms, with pioneering work on graphite, fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and graphene. She won a large number of awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Enrico Fermi Award, and is still the only woman to have been awarded the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience.

I was fortunate enough to meet her on a number of occasions and was deeply saddened by the news of her death last February. Her legacy will though endure for many years to come.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of celebration that helps people learn about the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths, inspiring others and creating new role models. We asked editors at Nature Research to talk about female scientists who’ve made major contributions to their fields.

If you’d like to tell us about a scientist who’s inspired you, get in touch with @nresearchnews and we’ll share some of our favourite tweets.

This is the first of a three-part blog series to celebrate blogs to mark this milestone which will be published over three days. You can read more about Ada Lovelace’s legacy here.

Juliane C Mossinger, Senior Editor, Nature

In the 1880s, when studying for a Ph.D. in geology, Florence Bascom had to take classes behind a screen so that she would not disturb her male colleagues. I wonder what she would have made of a news story in 2017 about a female Silicon Valley CEO, who dyed her blonde hair brown and started wearing gender neutral clothing in order to be taken more seriously by investors?

Florence Bascom became a leading expert in the classification of rocks and the process of mountain formation. She was the first woman hired by the U.S. Geological Survey, and the first woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America. But it was not just all her ‘firsts’ that paved the way for future generations of female geologists. She didn’t pull up the drawbridge behind her. On the contrary, she founded the geology department at Bryn Mawr College and personally trained a generation of successful female geologists during the early 20th century.

 May Chiao, Chief Editor, Nature Astronomy

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is very much in my thoughts. You see, next month is the 50th anniversary of the discovery of pulsars — rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit radio waves in the way that lighthouses sweep a light beam around.

As a PhD student, she first noticed a ‘smudge’ in the data printouts from a radio telescope that she helped build, and then she found several such smudges in the miles of printouts. Through her meticulous efforts, she convinced her supervisor, Antony Hewish, that the signals were real. In fact, they came from a new type of compact object. They published their work in Nature, and Hewish was awarded the Nobel prize in 1974.

She could have stopped there. But throughout her research career, Dame Jocelyn has held prominent posts that helped her to redress the gender imbalance, and inspire women and minorities to be successful in physics.

Andrew Bissette, Communications Chemistry

 When asked to think of a female chemist who has made major contributions to chemistry, Donna Blackmond immediately comes to mind.

Blackmond has made multiple major contributions to our understanding of catalysis, stereochemistry, and prebiotic chemistry. Her work demonstrates uncommon rigor and insight into the fundamental principles of physical organic chemistry, and reading her papers is reliably an educational experience.

Unlike many, Blackmond is not afraid to directly and openly address published errors. By challenging and correcting errors through essay and experiment, she has tangibly improved the quality of the literature.

I’m particularly enthusiastic about her work revealing the role of phase behaviour in non-linear effects. As well as clarifying some apparent inconsistent results concerning non-linear effects in asymmetric organocatalysis, this led directly to a thermodynamic model for the origin of biological homochirality. I believe this model will only grow in influence as the current generation of young researchers come of age.

Luíseach Nic Eoin, Associate Editor, Nature Ecology and Evolution

The archaeologist Dorothy Garrod was shy, retiring, and wasn’t a vocal advocate for women in science. That makes her sounds like a strange choice for Ada Lovelace Day, but she inspires me because she simply got things done, without concern for the glass ceilings she smashed.

She excavated with all-female teams across Europe and the Levant, finding sites, fossils and artefacts key to human evolution. This led to her election as the first female Oxbridge professor, before women could even graduate from Cambridge.

Despite her lofty position, she would set it aside to focus on what she thought was most important: first, when she put her unparalleled knowledge of European and Levantine topography to use in interpreting aerial photographs during WWII, and then ultimately in resigning her professorship to concentrate full time on her research.

Garrod’s concern was for the work at hand, rather than her legacy, but by breaking new ground in all senses of the term, she inspired and fostered generations of researchers.

 Alexa McKay, Associate Editor, Nature Communications

 Jane Lubchenco’s advice to women scientists is “If an opportunity doesn’t exist, create one.”

To balance the demands of academia with the needs of her family, she and her husband split a tenured professorship for over a decade while raising their children. During this innovative negotiated arrangement, Lubchenco produced extremely influential papers in both fundamental ecology and applied marine conservation, and also garnered numerous awards and honours.

These accomplishments propelled Lubchenco to further success in becoming the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; notably, she was the first woman to serve in this role. In that agency, and as a science advisor to President Obama, Lubchenco shaped key US environmental policies for oil spill responses, fisheries sustainability, and marine resilience to climate change.  Lubchenco inspires scientists to take up the mantle of policy engagement, and she advocates for the critical importance of diversity and inclusion in conservation biology.