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).
Laura H. Greene is the Marie Krafft Professor of Physics at Florida State University and chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. She was previously a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In September 2021, she was appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
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.
Hattie Carwell is an American physicist and former scientist with the United States Department of Energy and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In 1990, she became a program manager for high energy and nuclear programs with the DOE San Francisco Operations Office. She additionally was a lead operation engineer at the Berkeley Site Office from 1994 to 2006. She has also contributed to several non-profit organizations with the goal of promoting diversity within STEM-related fields.
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.
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.
Nash-Stevenson was born and raised in Lawrence County, Alabama. She graduated from Austin High School at the age of sixteen. She studied science and electronic and electrical engineering at Alabama A&M University in 1981. She was the first person to graduate from the Alabama A&M University physics masters program, where she was a NASA Fellow. She worked at Marshall Space Flight Center. Her professor, M. C. George, encouraged her to enter a PhD program. She was the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in physics at the Alabama A&M University in 1994. During her postgraduate studies she had two children. She is three-times magna cum laude. At the time she was one of fewer than twenty African-American women with a physics PhD in the United States. She was a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She worked on photon avalanche upconversion.
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.
