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The astronomer who discovered what stars are made of almost went unrecognized for her work

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin wrote "the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy" but encountered roadblock after roadblock due to gender bias.

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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the first to discover that stars were primarily hydrogen and helium.

If you asked an average person to name influential astronomers in history, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin likely wouldn't be among them. But there's an argument to be made that she should be a household name. She's the reason we know what stars are made of, but gender bias nearly kept the astrophysicist from gaining the recognition she deserved.

When 25-year-old Cecilia Payne put forth her thesis saying that stars were mostly hydrogen and helium in 1925, it went against the scientific consensus that stars were composed of the same elements as planets. Her breakthrough research proved that hydrogen, the simplest atom, was one of the most fundamental building blocks of the entire cosmos—a foundational fact that informs space research to this day. So why isn't she more familiar to us?

A gifted scientist from childhood

Payne-Gaposchkin proved to be a gifted scientist from an early age, and her parents made sure she had the best science education they could provide in her home country of England. At 19, she entered University of Cambridge on scholarship and soon fell in love with physics. But women in science were expected to study botany, and she soon found herself being humiliated as the only woman in a physics class taught by Nobel Prize winner Ernest Rutherford, a renowned pioneer in atomic and nuclear studies. “At every lecture [Rutherford] would gaze at me pointedly…and would begin in his stentorian voice: 'Ladies and gentlemen,'" she wrote in her autobiography. "All the boys regularly greeted this witticism with thunderous applause [and] stamping with their feet…at every lecture I wished I could sink into the earth. To this day I instinctively take my place as far back as possible in a lecture room.”

She found a more supportive mentor in astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, but even he told her she wouldn't have opportunities in England as a female astronomer after she finished at Cambridge. He did, however, offer her a glowing recommendation to work with Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, who was starting up a graduate studies program. In 1923, Payne moved to the U.S. to continue her studies at Harvard.

A brilliant thesis thwarted

However, she faced limitations due to her sex there as well. Women played a significant role at Harvard, largely in the role of human computers. In analyzing spectral data that Harvard computers had painstakingly collected and organized, Payne-Gaposchkin discovered that spectra from ionized atoms, like those in the hot outer atmosphere of stars, differed from neutral atoms of the same kind. Combining what she gleaned from her data analysis with a previously untested theory from Indian physicist Meghnad Saha, she produced her thesis, Stellar Atmospheres.

a group of women working at harvard in 1925 Cecilia Payne (top row, second from the left) with other women working at Harvard in 1925Harvard University Archives

Part of her thesis was well-received, but the part in which she discovered helium was 1000 times more abundant and hydrogen was 1,000,000 times more abundant in the stars than previously thought hit a bump. Princeton Observatory director Henry Russell, an outside examiner of her thesis, thought the idea that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen simply couldn't be true. "It is clearly impossible that hydrogen should be a million times more abundant than the metals,” he wrote to her. She would not be able to have her thesis accepted without Russell signing off on it, so she did was she felt she must. In her final draft, she wrote, “The enormous abundance derived for [hydrogen and helium] is almost certainly not real,” essentially disowning that part of her research result.

Proven right but without recognition

Ironically, Russell himself would prove her right just a few years later. In 1929, Russell published his own research, which had the same conclusion as Payne-Gaposhckin's but by a different method. He cited Payne-Gaposchkin’s work, noting that his results agreed with hers. However, he did not state that he had originally rejected her (correct) thesis. Later, Payne-Gaposhckin expressed regret at waffling on her findings. "I was to blame for not having pressed my point," she wrote in her autobiography. "I had given in to Authority when I believed I was right…I note it here as a warning to the young. If you are sure of your facts, you should defend your position.”

Payne-Gaposhckin continued research work and taught graduate courses, though she wasn't given the title of "professor" or even "instructor." Officially, she was Shapley's "technical assistant." When Shapley approached the dean and president of Harvard to have that changed, both refused. The president, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, said that Miss Payne “would never have a position in the University as long as he was alive."

Roadblock after roadblock simply because she was a woman

The biases against Payne-Gaposhckin as a woman stymied her again and again, but she persevered in her life's work. She technically earned the first Ph.D. in astronomy at Harvard, but it was officially awarded by Radcliffe, the women's college because Harvard's physics department chair refused to accept a woman candidate. She was paid poorly for her work and wasn't given any titles or positions that a man of her ability and qualifications would have been given. When Shapley launched the full department of astronomy at Harvard, he wanted Payne-Gaposchkin—his best researcher—to serve as its first chair, but he knew Lowell wouldn't allow it, so she was passed over for a male astronomer.

Despite teaching and researching, writing books and hundreds of papers, it would be three decades before Payne-Gaposchkin's contributions to astrophysics were recognized. She basically had to wait for the men with strong anti-woman biases to step down or retire and for men who saw and honored her brilliance to give her the recognition she had rightfully earned.

Finally a full professor and department chair

On June 21, 1956, The New York Times reported, “Harvard University announced today the appointment of Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin as Professor of Astronomy. She is the first woman to attain full professorship at Harvard through regular faculty promotion.” A few months later, she also became the first woman to head a department at Harvard as she became chair of the astronomy department. And a few years later, in 1960, distinguished astronomer Otto Struve referred to Payne-Gaposchkin's Stellar Atmospheres as “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

closeup of the sun The sun and other stars are primarily made of hydrogen and helium.Photo credit: Canva

Perhaps most impressive is that, through all of her hard work and continuous road blocks due to her gender, Payne-Gaposchkin managed to marry a fellow astronomer and raise three children. As physicist and author Sidney Perkowitz writes in Physics World writes in Physics World:

"In some sense, one might say she 'had it all' in combining science with family and children, but getting there was unnecessarily difficult and gruelling because of bias against women. She became a full professor only at age 56, much later than a man with similar achievements would have reached that status, and after being passed over for advancement, which must have taken a psychological toll. Only a person with exceptional drive and persistence, along with scientific ability, could have endured until final recognition."

In 1976, three years before she died, the American Astronomical Society awarded Payne-Gaposchkin the prestigious Henry Norris Russell Prize. In her acceptance lecture, she said, “The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something.”

Thank you, Dr. Payne-Gaposchkin, for not only being the first person on Earth to see what stars are made of, but for doing so in the face of all the obstacles unnecessarily placed in your path.

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Dr. Frances Arnold won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2018 — and that's not even the most impressive thing about her

Courtesy of Caltech

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When Dr. Frances Arnold received a call from the Nobel committee telling her she'd been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for chemistry, she was "stunned."

When you hear about her life up to that moment, you won't be.

Arnold was never one to be told what she could or couldn't do. At 15, she moved out of her parents' house in Pittsburgh as an act of rebellion, and supported herself by working in pizza parlors, as a waitress in jazz clubs, and as a taxi driver. She went to high school — occasionally — and managed to graduate, despite collecting a stack of truancy letters along the way.

She never stopped learning, though, even when she skipped class. She was always teaching herself things, from foreign languages to music to math.

"My power is collecting knowledge," she said in a podcast. "Somehow I knew early on that knowledge was like money in the bank. That if you could collect experiences, if you could teach yourself calculus, if you could read a history book — all of which I loved to do — if you could teach yourself music, then somehow it would add up."

And add up it did. Despite her shaky high school attendance, Arnold was admitted to Princeton — in part, she says, because she was the only female applicant to the mechanical engineering program, and in part because her dad was a nuclear physicist Princeton alum who may have pulled a few strings. (Despite her rebellion in high school and some clashes of opinion, Arnold had a close relationship with her father. "We fought all the time," she told the New York Times. "But he understood me.")

At university, she channeled the rebellious passions of her youth into a desire to contribute to the betterment of the world. "When you're very young, you can question," she says, "but you don't know how to solve the problem. At Princeton I was given some tools that I could use to actually attack a problem, and maybe even offer a solution."

After graduating in 1979, she set out to help President Carter meet his administration's renewable energy goals, an ambition that took her around the world, from South Korea to Brazil, working on solar energy. In 1985, she earned her PhD in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley, then joined Caltech, where she has worked as a researcher and professor for most of her career.

In 1989, Arnold was awarded the prestigious Packard Fellowship, which provides funding for promising, early-career scientists and engineers. She currently serves as chair of the fellowship's advisory board and spends much of her time running her lab at Caltech.

Arnold's primary scientific achievement is having pioneered a process for engineering proteins known as directed evolution. As a self-proclaimed "engineer of the biological world," Arnold figured out how to harness the power of evolution in the lab, to push that natural design process to places it wouldn't normally go, and essentially make biology do complex chemistry for us.

"Our whole chemicals industry, our whole lifestyle, is predicated on the need to take abundant starting materials and turn them into clothing, housing, food, and medicines for seven billion people," she says. "Basically everything that supports our lives is done through chemistry. And we do a terrible job at it. Human beings do chemistry very inefficiently; we've managed to pollute the planet at the same time that we provide these products for us."

She believed that we could look to the biological world for examples of how to take cheap, abundant, renewable starting materials, such as sunlight and carbon dioxide, and turn them into the products we use in our daily lives.

"Nature does it with protein catalysts called enzymes that convert one form of matter into another, and into all of life," she says. "Hers are the most beautiful, intricate, efficient, selective, non-polluting machines that you can imagine. Why not learn from the best?"

As Arnold says, "Nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible." Rather than figure out all of the intricate details of how those complicated processes work and try to recreate them, the scientists in her lab simply direct those natural processes to do chemistry more efficiently.

The possibilities that Arnold's work has opened up are practically limitless, but she remains laser-focused on sustainable development. "All my projects are about sustainability, bioremediation, and making things in a cleaner fashion," she told the Times. "Students come and say, I want to help people. I say, people get plenty of help. Why don't you help the planet?"

For example, one of the innovations she is spearheading with two former students who started a company called Provivi is to make non-toxic insect mating pheromones cheaply to use for crop protection. Pheromones can be released over crops to create sexual confusion in agricultural pests so they won't mate, thereby reducing or eliminating the need for pesticides.

So here we see an ambitious woman who is not only solving global problems, but doing so in a highly male-dominated field. She has won multiple coveted awards, including a Nobel prize. She speaks several languages, plays three musical instruments, and has personally been invited to meet the Queen of England and other heads of state.

It would be easy to think Arnold was just blessed with a charmed life, but that's not so. While building a successful career, she's also had to overcome a series of tragedies that would flatten many of us.

After her first marriage ended in divorce, her ex-husband died of colon cancer and she was left raising their young son on her own. Three years later, in 2004, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It spread to her lymph nodes and she went through 18 months of surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy, treatment that she said ruined her previously photographic memory.

In 2010, she lost her second husband, cosmologist Andrew Lange, to suicide. And in 2016, the middle of her three sons, William, died in an accident, which she still can't bring herself to speak about.

Arnold's life has been marked by crisis and victory, tragedy and triumph — and she has some words for those who express awe at her resilience.

"Nobody is guaranteed an easy life," she told the Times. "Look at the people in Syria. I have friends who are Holocaust survivors. What was I supposed to do? Give up, say I can't go on? No. I had three children. I had a group of young people in the lab. Why would I give up?

"You can't avoid challenges," she says. "You can only overcome them. You don't have control. Loved ones will die. You will not get the job that you really want. You will be laid off. Someone's going to criticize you. It's going to happen. How you respond to it dictates whether you will be happy or not."

Arnold is a unique woman by any measure. And part of what makes her a unique figure in science is her diverse skill set and knowledge beyond the lab. She approaches chemistry and biology not only as an engineer, but also as an artist and musician. Perhaps that's what has enabled her to think outside of the traditional scientific box and ignore the naysayers she's encountered throughout her career.

"You look at the code of life," she says. "To me, that's like a Beethoven symphony. It's something I could not compose. It's something intricate. It's stunningly beautiful. I can't compose it, but there's this machine, this evolutionary algorithm, and you just turn the crank, make random changes and select for function, and out comes all this wonderful diversity. Out comes all the life that you see around you. That has come out of this machine of natural evolution. I want to make a machine like that for artificial evolution. That's what we've been able to do, so now I can decide what I want my symphony to do. How does it make you feel? How does it give you something that you did not have before? I can turn the crank of evolution and create my own symphony."

Ultimately, she says, "I'm a builder…I love to build things. And if it's molecules, that's called chemistry. I love to create something that never existed before and that can also serve a purpose. I'm not a composer. I love music, but I can't compose. I'm not a poet. I love poetry — I'm not good at composing words. But I can compose molecules."

Her primary goal is to compose a molecular symphony that will create a cleaner planet for us all. "I want to take biology where it would never have gone, because I want to put it in service of helping humans live on this planet without destroying everything else."

Sounds like an excellent plan, Dr. Arnold.

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The doctor behind a revolutionary cancer test says it all started with the support of her refugee parents

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As a child, Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia's parents didn't ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up. Instead, her father would ask, "Are you going to be a doctor? Are you going to be an engineer? Or are you going to be an entrepreneur?"

Little did he know that she would successfully become all three: an award-winning biomedical and mechanical engineer who performs cutting-edge medical research and has started multiple companies.

Bhatia holds an M.D. from Harvard University, an M.S. in mechanical engineering from MIT, and a PhD in biomedical engineering from MIT. Bhatia, a Wilson professor of engineering at MIT, is currently serving as director of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, where she's working on nanotechnology targeting enzymes in cancer cells. This would allow cancer screenings to be done with a simple urine test.

Bhatia owes much of her impressive career to her family. Her parents were refugees who met in graduate school in India; in fact, she says her mom was the first woman to earn an MBA in the country. The couple immigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s, started a family, and worked hard to give their two daughters the best opportunities.

"They made enormous sacrifices to pick a town with great public schools and really push us to excel the whole way," Bhatia says. "They really believed in us, but they expected excellence. The story I like to tell about my dad is like, if you brought home a 96 on a math test, the response would be, 'What'd you get wrong?'"

Bhatia's father saw her potential in STEM and encouraged her from an early age. "I was good at math and science, and I was a tinkerer. I was always taking apart the family answering machine," she says. "He thought that I had the potential to be an engineer and he saw that I loved my high school biology class. So he brought me actually here, to MIT, where we met a family friend, and he was using focused ultrasound to treat cancer. And that really captured my imagination, the idea that you could build instruments for a medical intervention to impact human health. That really got me excited. And so I decided to study biomedical engineering."

At first, Bhatia didn't realize what an uphill climb science and engineering fields were for women, but it soon became clear.

"Freshman year we were 50/50 women and men," she says. "And by the time I graduated senior year, there were about seven women left in the class of a hundred. And I sort of realized what everyone was talking about with how women were underrepresented in engineering...what I'd experienced was the so-called 'leaky pipeline.'

"Then when I came to graduate school, when I joined mechanical engineering, I was one of very few women," she says. "And I would say that's persisted as I go on in my career. When I joined the faculty at UC San Diego, I was one of two women. And when I start companies, I'm often the only woman pitching a room of venture capitalists. I'm sometimes the only physician in a crowd of engineers, and sometimes the only engineer in a crowd of biologists or physicians."

One thing that helped Bhatia avoid falling through the cracks herself was winning a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering — a prestigious $875,000 prize given to a select group of the nation's most promising early-career scientists and engineers.

"When you're starting out as a young professor, you have all these bright ideas about things that you want to do," she says. "But the very first thing you have to do is you have to raise resources to do those experiments, to hire the students, to staff up the lab, to buy the reagents, to do the experiments."

Raising money isn't easy. Scientific research and innovation is a long game — more of a marathon than a sprint. It can take 10 to 20 years or more for an idea to go from seed to fruition, and multiple hurdles can arise through the process. As a result, funding is often limited or tightly controlled.

But the Packard Fellowship allowed Bhatia to freely explore various ideas and innovations that might not normally receive grant funding, such as creating a functioning 3D-printed liver.

"We were interested in that idea that we could print livers, three-dimensional livers, layer by layer, with light," she says. "And so I used the fellowship to explore that, to find materials that could cross-link when they were exposed to light and that would allow us to layer liver cells and build three-dimensional livers. And that actually has turned into a whole program in my lab where we've built little livers that we hope will replace transplantation. And so that was totally seeded. It was something that was an idea. I don't think I could have ever gotten grant funding for it because I had no what we call preliminary data — it was just a thought. And it's turned into a big, successful program."

One thing that's unique about the Packard Fellowship is that the funds are unrestricted, meaning a recipient can use the money any way they see fit. That feature not only provides freedom to explore ideas, but it can be especially helpful for women in STEM. For example, Bhatia had her first daughter in 2003 — four years into her fellowship — and being able to use the funds as needed during a critical time in her career and family life was huge.

"I think one of the things that you worry a lot about when you're a young mom scientist is that balance of making an impact in your profession, but also being the mom that you always wanted to be," she says. "And the Packard Foundation allowed me to use $10,000 a year of that fund to help support quality daycare for her, or night care. So if I was going to a conference and I needed help, or if I wanted to bring her along and got a second hotel room, there were no questions asked. It was just recognized that this was a stressor, and you could use this research funding to support that dimension of your life, which was really forward thinking and unusual."

Bhatia says the expectations in science and engineering have had to change as more women have entered the field, and she's personally had to navigate how to make it all work.

"The profession grew up around people where the vision was that you would work 24/7 to advance your idea," she says. "And often you had a whole family around you that was supporting you so that you could focus on that effort. And I think when women came into the field, we had to rethink that a little bit. So I traveled less, I wanted to stay home one day a week and be with my daughter, and I had to sort of recraft a vision for the profession that I thought I wanted it to be. And one of the biggest problems is how to pay for it all. How do you cook for the family? How do you clean your house? How do you get your baby out the door? Those are very real issues. And you know, you go up for tenure and you're establishing your scientific vision when you're in your thirties. It's an incredible crunch time, so it all sort of happens at once. And those financial offsets that you can give people in those formative years—that can make a difference between whether you stay in science and whether you don't."

Bhatia dedicates time and resources toward helping girls and young women find success in the field. Realizing that many girls lose interest in math and science in middle school, Bhatia and some female friends in graduate school founded a program called Keys to Empower Youth.

"The idea was that we would bring middle school girls here from the community. Many of them had never been to a college campus and they would get to experience hands-on high-tech activities that they wouldn't have access to in the community. Also, over the course of the day, they would meet a dozen young women engineers. Those were the college students here in the Society of Women Engineers, and that's also really important for them to see in front of them. You know, girls that are just a little bit older who have chosen this profession, who are making their way, so that they can feel like it's an accessible choice for them. That program is now 25 years old and it's spread to multiple institutions."

But, Bhatia says, more needs to be done. Though women are increasingly choosing STEM careers, engineering in particular is still a highly male-dominated field.

"We're not there yet and the slope of the line is not steep enough," she says. "If we keep going at the current rate, it's going to be 2092 before we have parity in the engineering world. It's just not fast enough."

Bhatia maintains hope, however, and sees her own story as an example of what's possible.

"I'm the daughter of immigrants," she says. "I came from a part of the world where even today, not all girls are educated. And I had my parents invest in my education, and I had the benefit of amazing public schools and private institutions, and have found myself in the halls of one of the most elite places in the world. Working with the best and the brightest minds on the problems of our time. And I think that I stand in a lot of ways for what's possible in this country, to collect people from all over and to point them to what matters."

Kudos to Dr. Bhatia for being a role model for women in STEM, and to the Packard Foundation for helping fix some of the less recognized leaks in the pipeline.

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13-year-old publishes scientific paper showing hand dryers can damage kids' hearing.

Here's to young female scientists leading the way.

YYC Science Fair/Twitter (left), GoldieBlox/Twitter (right)

If you've ever been in a public restroom with a small child, you may have heard them complain about the hand dryers or seen them covering their ears as they walk by them.

It turns out, there's a scientific reason for that.

Nora Keegan of Calgary, Canada just published a paper in a medical journal with research proving that hand dryers may be detrimental to children's hearing. But the coolest thing? She's only 13.

When she was younger, Keegan noticed that her ears would sometimes ring after she starting using hand dryers in public restrooms. "I also noticed that children would not want to use hand dryers, and they'd be covering their ears," she told NPR.

So at age nine, she decided to explore whether automatic hand dryers might actually damage children's hearing. Between 2015 and 2017, she tested the volume of 44 hand dryers in public restrooms in Alberta, Canada. Using a decibel meter, she measured the noise levels of different hand dryers from various heights and distances.

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Children's hearing is more sensitive than adults, and they hear the blowing from a different angle than adults do. As Keegan points out, "Hand dryers are actually really, really loud, and especially at children's heights since they're close to where the air comes out."

Keegan found that Xlerator brand dryers and two types of Dyson Airblades were the loudest, exceeding 100 decibels. In her study, she noted that volume can lead to "learning disabilities, attention difficulties, and ruptured ear drums."

"My loudest measurement was 121 decibels from a Dyson Airblade model," she told NPR. "And this is not good because Health Canada doesn't allow toys for children to be sold over 100 decibels, as they know that they can damage children's hearing."

Keegan's research confirmed her original hypothesis, and she presented her findings at a Calgary Youth Science fair earlier this year. Then, in June, her study was published in the Canadian journal, Paediatrics & Child Health.

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Keegan's published paper states, "Previous research has suggested that hand dryers may operate at dangerously loud levels for adults. No research has explored whether they operate at a safe level for children's hearing."

"More children lately are getting noise-induced hearing loss, and the more exposure children have to loud noises, the more likely they are to have hearing problems later in life," the study continues. "Children's sense of hearing continues to develop during their first several years of life, and loud noise exposure in this period can damage their hearing development."

The middle-schooler told NPR she hopes her study will lead to more research and eventually prompt Canada to regulate the noise levels of hand dryers.

Here's to young female scientists leading the way!

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Miss Virginia 2019 is a biochemist, crowned after performing a science experiment for her talent.

Science smarts are super sexy.

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Dancing, singing, baton-twirling—when it comes to the talent portion of beauty pageants, we generally know what to expect.

But Camille Schrierturned that standard on its head when she performed an explosive science experiment for her talent in the Miss Virginia 2019 competition. The 24-year-old biochemist demonstrated and explained the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, a chemical reaction that happens when a catalyst (potassium iodide in this case) comes into contact with hydrogen peroxide. Schrier mixed the chemicals in three large flasks on a table, making colored foam spout high into the air and land in goopy piles on the stage.

How Miss Virginia Won Her Crown Thanks to Sciencewww.youtube.com

"Keep an eye out," she told the cheering audience at the end of her demonstration, "because science really is all around us."

The judges were clearly impressed with Schrier's talent as well as the rest of her pageant performance, as they ultimately awarded her the Miss Virginia 2019 crown.

Schrier, a graduate of Virginia Teach currently studying to be a Doctor of Pharmacy at Virginia Commonwealth University, told the audience and judges that she's loved science since she was a little girl. That passion has fueled her goals both as a student and as a pageant contestant.

"I am more than Miss Virginia," Schrier said in a release. "I am Miss Biochemist, Miss Systems Biologist, Miss Future PharmD looking toward a pharmaceutical industry career. Now was the time for me to create a mind shift about the concept of talent by bringing my passion for STEM to the stage. To me, talent is not a passion alone, but also a skill which is perfected over years of learning."

In an interview with Inside Edition, Schrier said that she'd be taking her science talents to the Miss America stage. "It might be a little bit different," she said, "but it will definitely be a chemistry demonstration."

According to CNN, Schrier's platform issue for the competition was opioid abuse awareness and drug safety. She will compete in the Miss America pageant in September.

Here's to more women challenging expectations and creating new standards for talent and beauty.

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Heroes

Astronomer Vera Rubin passed away Sunday. You should know about her if you don't.

Astronomer Vera Rubin passed away Dec. 25, 2016, at the age of 88.

Vera Rubin. Photo by Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Rubin was a pioneer in her field — one of the few prominent women astronomers of her time, who, in an era of oppressive professional sexism, uncovered some of the best evidence of the existence of dark matter — the mysterious stuff that we can't see that binds the universe together.

In addition to contributing to one of the major scientific discoveries of the 20th century, she was also a no-nonsense badass who fought for gender equality in her field from the beginning of the career to the end of her life.

Here are just a few of the ways she showed up:

1. She was blunt about the problems women faced in science — and knew exactly where to place the blame.

Rubin (second from left) with colleagues at the Women in Astronomy and Space Science Conference. Photo by NASA.

According to her NPR obituary, Rubin was fantastically upfront about the injustice and institutionalized misogyny that kept women out of jobs in STEM fields, noting that Rubin carried three basic assumptions with her at all times:

"(1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman.

(2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women.

(3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women."

Hard to argue with that.

2. She presented her graduate thesis to a room full of the most prominent astronomers in the world — while pregnant.

While in graduate school in the 1950s, Rubin discovered something anomalous about the space just outside our cosmic neighborhood — a region that was more densely packed with galaxies than those that surrounded it.

But when her adviser suggested she present her findings to the American Astronomical Society, he offered to present it for her because Rubin was set to deliver her first child a month before the meeting and he assumed she would be too consumed with the demands of motherhood to attend.

"Oh, I can go,'" she said matter-of-factly. And go she did.

She stumped her way through the presentation, where her work was largely dismissed by the review panel of accomplished, skeptical male scientists (and never published). Years later, however, astronomers confirmed the significance of her findings: Rubin had discovered the super-galactic plane, the "belt" around the supercluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way — without anyone, including her, realizing it.

3. She once integrated the bathrooms at an all-male observatory by force.

"No girls allowed. Nah nah Pbbbbffffbbbtt." Photo by Coneslayer/Wikimedia Commons.

Early in her career, Rubin was invited to observe at Caltech's Palomar Observatory — the first woman ever allowed to work inside the testosterone-laden facility. The observatory was such a boys club that there was no ladies room on the premises.

"She went to her room, she cut up paper into a skirt image, and she stuck it on the little person image on the door of the bathroom," Neta Bahcall, a former colleague, told Astronomy Magazine in a June 2016 interview. "She said, 'There you go; now you have a ladies’ room.'"

4. She never won the Nobel Prize, and despite the many outraged on her behalf, she didn't really care.

No woman has won the Nobel Prize in physics for over 50 years — not due, according to many professionals in the field, to lack of qualified candidates, of whom Rubin was the most prominent.

Rubin, however, was dismissive of the snub as she felt her work spoke for itself.

"Fame is fleeting," Rubin said, in a 1990 interview with Discover Magazine. "My numbers mean more to me than my name. If astronomers are still using my data years from now, that's my greatest compliment."

5. She was only active on Twitter for one day — and used that time to tell girls who love science to ignore the haters.

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On Feb. 3, 2016, Vera Rubin signed on to Twitter. She tweeted this:

— (@)

She signed off the social media site for good shortly after but not before tweeting one final look at the cosmos — a simulated image of all the dark matter in the universe a short time after the Big Bang.

— (@)

Because of Rubin, we can do more than admire the beauty of the universe; we can start to break down the mystery piece by piece, layer by layer. And we can do it no matter who we are, where we come from, or however many barriers stand in our way.

Rest in peace.

See science come alive with a little help from these amazing illustrations.

Rachel Ignotofsky's book sits at the intersection of art, science, and history.

Name five women scientists you learned about in school. Go ahead, I'll wait.

GIF via "Sherlock."

I got to three very quickly but had to think for a moment to get to five. It's not because these researchers, explorers, and innovators don't exist; I simply didn't learn about their work and contributions to history in school. It just wasn't a large part of the curriculum. And, sadly, my experience isn't unique.

You can't be what you can't see,which may be why women remain underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) roles. Just 25% of computer and mathematical science professionals and a mere 13% of engineers today are women.

But one woman is doing her part to help change that. And she's doing it with comics.

Seriously, comics.

Rachel Ignotofsky is a Kansas City-based artist and designer whose first book is an illustrated look at 50 game-changing women across centuries of scientific discovery and inquiry.

But why comics? It's the medium that changed her life.

Ignotofsky had a difficult time learning to read and grew frustrated until she found her secret weapon.

"The only thing that ... got me through it was educational comic books and cartoons," Ignotofsky said. "It gave me this push to learn information that was for the 'smart kids.'"

Ignotofsky grew up loving comics, design, and science. (If a career as an artist didn't work out, medical school was young Rachel's backup plan.) So she channeled her passions into "Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World." The book is a beautifully curated collection of personal narratives from female scientists from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines, with a dash of whimsy thrown in.

Ignotofsky hopes it will open doors to kids and adults interested in learning more about the women who shaped not only science, but history. And after her childhood struggle with reading, she knows firsthand how well comics can deliver information.

"I feel like there's a real struggle with scientific literacy, especially in this country," Ignotofsky said. "You have to win people over. And you can convince anyone to do anything with illustration."

Check out a few of the courageous women in science profiled in Ignotofsky's book.

1. Edith Clarke, who worked as a human calculator and became General Electric's first female electrical engineer.

She's also a Badger. On, Wisconsin!

2. Marie Curie, the two-time Nobel Prize winning physicist and chemist who discovered polonium and radium.

3. Paleontologist and fossil collector, Mary Anning, who at age 12 discovered an intact dinosaur skeleton. Though respected in the field, Anning was never allowed to publish her work because she was a woman.

4. Patricia Bath, a physician, professor, and inventor who brought eye care to people in need and developed the laser probe used to treat cataracts.

5. Rosalind Franklin was a pioneering chemist and x-ray crystallographer who discovered the double helix shape of DNA.

6. Sylvia Earle, a celebrated marine biologist and aquanaut, who explored the recesses of our oceans to study the plants and animals found in the depths.

7. Hypatia, one of the earliest recorded female mathematicians and teachers who was also an expert philosopher.

But even with the amazing women she highlights in her book, Ignotofsky still remembers the women she had to leave out.

Women like pioneering Indian botanist Janaki Ammal, paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey, accomplished physicist and astronaut Sally Ride, and Irene Joliet-Curie, daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie and a talented chemist in her own right. But for this collection, Ignotofsky had to make some tough calls and let variety be her guide.

"I could've had 50 women in chemistry if I wanted to, but I really wanted to have a diverse group."

Physicist Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. Photo via NASA.

But, luckily, for Ignotofsky — and all of us who love women in science — there are plenty of women in science for another book or two ... or 20.

Women are earning just over half of the undergraduate degrees in STEM fields, and we're re-writing history and making groundbreaking discoveries every day. The future belongs to these rising stars, and they have these courageous pioneers to thank.

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