This is a timeline of women in science in the United States.
1848: Maria Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she had discovered a new comet the year before.
1894: Florence Bascom became the first female fellow of the Geological Society of America.
1912: Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied the bright-dim cycle periods of Cepheid stars, then found a way to calculate the distance from such stars to Earth.
1925: Florence Sabin became the first woman elected to the National Academy of Science.
1928: Alice Evans became the first woman elected president of the Society of American Bacteriologists.
1936: Edith Patch became the first female president of the Entomological Society of America.
1940s: Barbara McClintock discovered genetic transposition.
1950: Esther Lederberg was the first to isolate lambda bacteriophage, a DNA virus, from Escherichia coli K-12.
1952: Grace Hopper completed what is considered to be the first compiler, a program that allows a computer user to use English-like words instead of numbers. It was known as the A-0 compiler.
1963: Maria Goeppert Mayer became the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics; she shared the prize with Eugene Paul Wigner and J. Hans D. Jensen. She was born in Poland, but became a U.S. citizen in 1933.
1975: Chien-Shiung Wu, born in China, became the first female president of the American Physical Society.
1976: Margaret Burbidge, born in England, was named as the first female president of the American Astronomical Society.
1978: Anna Jane Harrison became the first female president of the American Chemical Society.
1984: Carol W. Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn (Blackburn was born in Australia) discovered telomerase, an enzyme that maintains telomeres, or chromosome ends.
1992: Edith M. Flanigen became the first woman awarded the Perkin Medal (widely considered the highest honor in American industrial chemistry) for her outstanding achievements in applied chemistry. The medal especially recognized her syntheses of aluminophosphate and silicoaluminophosphate molecular sieves as new classes of materials.
2004: Lucy Sanders (1954-) co-founded the National Center for Women & Information Technology
2012: Clara Lazen, then a fifth grader, discovered the molecule tetranitratoxycarbon.
