Mae Carol Jemison is an American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut. She became the first African-American woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992. Jemison joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1987 and was selected to serve for the STS-47 mission, during which the Endeavour orbited the Earth for nearly eight days on September 12–20, 1992.
Kathryn Ryan Cordell Thornton is an American scientist and a former NASA astronaut with over 975 hours in space, including 21 hours of extravehicular activity. She was the associate dean for graduate programs at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, currently a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
The National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP), established in the United States in 1977, is a non-profit professional organization with the goal to promote the professional well-being of African Diaspora physicists and physics students within the international scientific community and the world community at large.
Aprille Joy Ericsson is an American aerospace engineer currently serving as the assistant secretary of defense for science and technology. Ericsson is the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Howard University and the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in engineering at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).
Beth A. Brown was a NASA astrophysicist with a research focus on X-ray observations of elliptical galaxies and black holes. She earned a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Michigan in 1998, becoming the first African-American woman to do so.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an American theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist at the University of New Hampshire. She is also an advocate of increasing diversity in science.
Nadya Mason is dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at The University of Chicago, receiving that appointment in October 2023. Prior to joining The University of Chicago, she was 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 was the Director of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC), and Director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology from September 2022 through September 2023. She was 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.
Shohini Ghose is a quantum physicist and Professor of Physics and Computer Science at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has served as the president of the Canadian Association of Physicists (2019-2020), co-editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Physics, and the Director of the Laurier Centre for Women in Science. She was named a 2014 TED Fellow and a 2018 TED Senior Fellow. In 2019 she appeared on the Star TV show TED Talks India Nayi Baat hosted by Shah Rukh Khan. In 2017 she was elected to the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Her book Clues to the Cosmos was released in India in December 2019. In 2020, she was selected as an NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering.
Jami Valentine Miller is a patent examiner at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. She was the first African American woman to graduate with a PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins University. She created the website AAWIP.com, which celebrates African American Women in Physics.
Deborah J. Jackson is an American physicist and Program Manager at the National Science Foundation, and a Fellow of the National Society of Black Physicists. She was the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. She is an expert on "electromagnetic phenomena" with a research and development career that spans the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum from materials studies using hard x-ray wavelengths, to nonlinear optics and spectroscopy in the near-infrared, to the fielding of radio frequency instrumentation on deep space missions such as Cassini and Mars Observer.
Shelia Nash-Stevenson is an American physicist and engineer. Nash-Stevenson was the first Black woman in Alabama to earn a PhD in physics.
Zohra Aziza Baccouche was an American physicist and science filmmaker. She was an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Science and Engineering fellow at CNN and founder and CEO of media company Aziza Productions. Declared legally blind at the age of eight, Baccouche lost her sight due to a brain tumor at eight years old. She died in 2021.
Barbara Ann Williams is an American radio astronomer who was the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astronomy. Her research largely focused on compact galaxy groups, in particular observations of their emissions in the H I region in order to build up a larger scale picture of the structure and evolution of galaxies. Williams was named as the Outstanding Young Woman of America in 1986. She is a retired associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware.
Willie S. Rockward is a physics professor and has served as the chair of the department of physics and engineering physics at Morgan State University since August 2018. His research interests include Micro/Nano Optics Lithography, Extreme Ultraviolet Interferometry, Metamaterials, Terahertz imaging, Nanostructure Characterization, and Crossed Phase Optics. From 2018 to 2020 he was the president of the National Society of Black Physicists.
Irvy (Igle) Gledhill is a South African physicist at the University of Witwatersrand, School of Mechanical, Industrial & Aeronautical Engineering, in Johannesburg.
Eun-Suk Seo is a Korean-American astrophysicist known for her observational research on cosmic rays. She is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is also affiliated with the Institute for Physical Science and Technology and heads the Cosmic Ray Physics Group.
Arlene Paige Maclin is an American physicist and academic administrator. Maclin was one of the first African American women to receive a PhD in physics. She is a professor at Howard University.
Donald Anderson Edwards was an American physicist. Edwards was the founding chair of the physics department at North Carolina A&T State University, and spent his career teaching there and at other historically Black colleges and universities across the United States. His research was in the field of X-ray diffraction crystallography, and he was known for his 1931 determination of the complete crystal structure of potassium nitrate.
Ann Fite Whitaker is a retired American physicist who worked for many years at NASA on the effects of space environments on materials. Although she trained to become an astronaut, she never went to space.
Florencia Canelli is since 2021 the appointed Swiss scientific delegate to the CERN council, the supreme decision-making authority of the CERN Organization. From 2021-2024, she was appointed chair of the IUPAP division of particles and field (C11). From 2021-2023, she was co-coordinator of the physics program of the CMS collaboration, a CERN experiment with over 3000 physicists. In 2010, Canelli was awarded the IUPAP Young scientist prize, an international prize awarded to one experimental and one theoretical physicist per year, for "her pioneering contribution to the identification and precision measurements of rare phenomenon through the use of advanced analysis techniques to separate very small signals from large background processes at the Tevatron collider." She has been an author on four multi-purpose collider experiments, namely the CMS experiment and ATLAS experiment at the CERN LHC, and the CDF experiment and D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron. She is currently a full professor at the University of Zurich, Physics Institute, specializing in particle physics.
