10 Female Scientists of Color You Should Know

Katherine Johnson (Photo via NASA/Sean Smith)

Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson loved to count. Moreover, she loved math and science, and it soon showed. By the time she was ten years old, Johnson had already been admitted into the local high school, thanks to sky-high grades and a voracious mind. Johnson would graduate from high school at fourteen, and then college at eighteen years old.

Later, she would remember that “I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.” She would go on to work at the Langley Research Center in the Guidance and Navigation Department from 1953 to her retirement in 1986.

After working as a teacher and stay-at-home parent, Johnson would join NACA during World War II as a computer. Unlike many other organizations, NACA kept many of its female mathematicians and engineers after the end of the war.

Johnson helped to calculate the trajectory for Alan Shepard, who made the first manned flight of the Mercury program. He was the second person and the first American to travel into space. She continued to work at NASA until 1986, lending her scientific expertise to the Apollo and space shuttle missions.

In November 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama.

Next: Dorothy Vaughan