Ainissa Ramirez | |
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| Born | New York, New York, U.S. |
| Alma mater | |
| Scientific career | |
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| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Mechanisms and effects of wear on amorphous carbon thin films |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert Sinclair |
| Website | www |
Ainissa Ramirez is an American materials scientist and science communicator. [1]
Ramirez credits watching the PBS television show 3-2-1 Contact growing up for inspiring her to pursue science, where she saw a young black girl solving problems and enjoying science. [2] Ramirez attended an all-girls Catholic high school in Jersey City, New Jersey. [3] To prepare to pursue a science degree in college, she took classes in calculus and electrical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology on Saturdays. [4]
Ramirez earned a Sc.B. in Materials Science from Brown University in 1990. [2]
She earned her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University in 1998. Her dissertation is titled Mechanisms and effects of wear on amorphous carbon thin films with Robert Sinclair serving as her dissertation adviser. [5] As a graduate student, she was a science correspondent for Time magazine’s Washington, D.C. bureau, which inspired her on a pathway for communicating science. [6]
From 2003 to 2011, Ramirez was an Assistant, then Associate Professor, in the Mechanical and Materials Science Department at Yale University, [7] [8] where she taught an undergraduate course entitled "Introduction to Materials Science". [9] Prior to being on the faculty at Yale, for four years she was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. She co-developed [10] a "universal solder" that can bond metal to glass, ceramics, diamond, and semiconductor oxide substrates. [11] Ramirez has been a visiting professor at MIT.
In 2004, she founded Science Saturdays, a program of entertaining science lectures for middle school children. [12]
In 2012, Ramirez gave a TED talk on the main stage in Los Angeles on the importance of STEM education. [13]
After 10 years at Yale, Ramirez made a career change from academia and became a self-declared "science evangelist". [14] She hosts two short science video series called Science Xplained and Material Marvels. She also produces a podcast series called Science Underground. [15]
In 2013, Ramirez published the TED book Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists. [16] [17] The book asks for a recommitment to improve STEM education for schools and throughout society. [16] In the same year, Ramirez co-authored a book with Allen St. John titled Newton's Football: The Science Behind America's Game, which discusses the science behind American football. [18] [19]
In 2020, Ramirez published the book The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, which explores eight significant inventions and the little-known inventors behind them, particularly people of color and women. [20] [21] Ramirez states that the clock and artificial lighting helped end pre-industrial habits of nightly biphasic sleep. The book documents Carl Sagan's process of including global music on the Voyager Golden Record. [22] Other inventions include copper communication cables, hard disks, photographic film, scientific glassware, silicon chips, and steel rails. [23] Smithsonian listed the book in their Ten Best Science Books of 2020. [24]
Select recognitions for her research, outreach, and book publications include:
Mildred Dresselhaus, known as the "Queen of Carbon Science", was an American physicist, materials scientist, and nanotechnologist. She was an institute professor and professor of both physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also served as the president of the American Physical Society, the chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the director of science in the US Department of Energy under the Bill Clinton Government. Dresselhaus won numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the Enrico Fermi Award, the Kavli Prize and the Vannevar Bush Award.
Margaret J. Geller is an American astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Her work has included pioneering maps of the nearby universe, studies of the relationship between galaxies and their environment, and the development and application of methods for measuring the distribution of matter in the universe.
Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi is an American chemist and Nobel laureate, known for her wide-ranging work spanning both chemistry and biology. She coined the term "bioorthogonal chemistry" for chemical reactions compatible with living systems. Her recent efforts include synthesis of chemical tools to study cell surface sugars called glycans and how they affect diseases such as cancer, inflammation, and viral infections like COVID-19. At Stanford University, she holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Bertozzi is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and is the former director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Paul Bloom is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, fiction, and art.
The Andrew Gemant Award is a prize awarded by the American Institute of Physics to a person who has made substantial cultural, artistic, or humanistic contributions to physics. The award is named after Andrew Gemant, a pioneer in materials science.
The Pfizer Award is awarded annually by the History of Science Society "in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the history of science"
Keller Easterling is an American architect, urbanist, writer, and professor. She is Enid Storm Dwyer Professor and Director of the MED Program at Yale University.
The Isaac Newton Medal and Prize is a gold medal awarded annually by the Institute of Physics (IOP) accompanied by a prize of £1,000. The award is given to a physicist, regardless of subject area, background or nationality, for outstanding contributions to physics. The award winner is invited to give a lecture at the Institute. It is named in honour of Sir Isaac Newton.
William R. Newman is Distinguished Professor and Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University. Most of Newman’s work in the History of Science has been devoted to alchemy and "chymistry," the art-nature debate, and matter theories, particularly atomism. Newman is also General Editor of the Chymistry of Isaac Newton, an online resource combining born-digital editions of Newton’s alchemical writings with multimedia replications of Newton’s alchemical experiments. In addition, he was Director of the Catapult Center for Digital Humanities and Computational Analysis of Texts at Indiana University. Newman is on the editorial boards of Archimedes, Early Science and Medicine, and HOPOS.
Chinedum Osuji is the Eduardo D. Glandt Presidential Professor and the departmental chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering (CBE) at University of Pennsylvania. He is also a former Taekwondo Olympian and represented Trinidad and Tobago. His laboratory works on polymers and soft materials for functional application including liquid filtration. He is the associate editor of the journal Macromolecules.
Claudia Megan Urry is an American astrophysicist, who has served as the President of the American Astronomical Society, as chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University, and as part of the Hubble Space Telescope faculty. She is currently the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University and Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Urry is notable not only for her contributions to astronomy and astrophysics, including work on black holes and multiwavelength surveys, but also for her work addressing sexism and sex equality in astronomy, science, and academia more generally.
Laurie Renee Santos is an American cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale University. She is the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory, Director of Yale's Canine Cognition Lab, and former Head of Yale's Silliman College. She has been a featured TED speaker and has been listed in Popular Science as one of their "Brilliant Ten" young scientists in 2007 as well as in Time magazine as a "Leading Campus Celebrity" in 2013.
Caroline Hunter is an anti-apartheid activist, chemist and educator. She co-founded the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement which petitioned the Polaroid corporation to end its support of the South African apartheid system.
Mariangela Lisanti is an American theoretical physicist and an associate professor of physics at Princeton University. Her work focuses on understanding dark matter and dark energy using tools developed through artificial intelligence.
Tracy Robyn Slatyer is a professor of particle physics with a concentration in theoretical astrophysics with tenure at MIT. She was a 2014 recipient of the Rossi Prize for gamma ray detection of Fermi bubbles, which are unexpected large structure in our galaxy. Her research also involves seeking explanations for dark matter and the gamma ray haze at the center of the Milky Way. In 2021, she was awarded a New Horizons in Physics Prize for "major contributions to particle astrophysics, from models of dark matter to the discovery of the "Fermi Bubbles."
Jedidah C. Isler is an American astrophysicist, educator, and an active advocate for diversity in STEM. She became the first African-American woman to complete her PhD in astrophysics at Yale in 2014. She is currently an assistant professor of astrophysics at Dartmouth College. Her research explores the physics of blazars and examines the jet streams emanating from them. In November 2020, Isler was named a member of Joe Biden's presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Nadya Mason is the Rosalyn Sussman Yalow Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a condensed matter experimentalist, she works on the quantum limits of low-dimensional systems. Mason is the Director of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC) and, since September 2022, the Director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. She is the first woman and woman of color to work as the director at the institute. In 2021, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
This is a timeline of women in science, spanning from ancient history up to the 21st century. While the timeline primarily focuses on women involved with natural sciences such as astronomy, biology, chemistry and physics, it also includes women from the social sciences and the formal sciences, as well as notable science educators and medical scientists. The chronological events listed in the timeline relate to both scientific achievements and gender equality within the sciences.
Prineha Narang is an American physicist and computational material scientist. She is a Professor of Physical Sciences and Howard Reiss Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Narang currently serves as a U.S. Science Envoy approved by the Secretary of State to identify opportunities for science and technology cooperation. Before moving to UCLA, she was first an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University Center for the Environment and then an Assistant Professor in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Narang’s work has been recognized internationally by many awards and a variety of special designations, including the Mildred Dresselhaus Prize, the 2021 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics, a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and a Max Planck Sabbatical Award from the Max Planck Society. Narang also received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2020, was named a Moore Inventor Fellow by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for the development for a fundamentally new strategy for single molecule sensing and environmental toxin metrology using picoscale quantum sensors, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review. Narang was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.
Julia Mae Phillips is an American physicist. She began her career in materials research on thin films on semiconductors and has transitioned into leadership roles in science policy. She currently serves on the National Science Board.
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