Today, in Norway, the 2023 Abel Prize was awarded to the Argentine mathematician, Luis A. Caffarelli. But how many women win international science prizes? Here, we highlight some of the incredible winners of recent science prizes from around the world, and show where there's still representation needed.
Dr Lara A. Thompson, Winner of the 2022 Alan T. Waterman Award
The Alan T. Waterman Award is the most prestigious prize for early-career (those under 40) scientists and engineers in the US. Usually awarded to one or two people, this is the first year the award has gone to three individuals. While all the achievements of the winners are highly commendable, Lara A. Thompson from the University of the District of Columbia is the first woman of colour to have won the prize, which we think is a huge achievement.
Thompson works in bioengineering, with her work on understanding and mitigating the effects of loss of balance in people winning her the prize. She knew she wanted to work in the field of health from a young age and it was while studying at Harvard-MIT that she became interested in combining engineering and medicine. Thompson decided to focus on how using an inner-ear implant could help with balance issues, and this led to investigating how various assistive technologies and robotics can improve balance in elderly individuals and survivors of stroke.
Dr Katalin Karikó - Winner of the 2022 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
The Breakthrough Prize recognizes the world’s top scientists working in the fundamental sciences – the disciplines that ask the biggest questions and find the deepest explanations. Each prize is $3 million and presented in the fields of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics. As of yet, no women have won either the Fundamental Physics Prize or the Mathematics Prize. Luckily for us, women have been recognised in the field of Life Sciences.
Katalin Karikó won the prize in 2022, alongside her colleague Drew Weissman, for engineering modified RNA technology which enabled rapid development of effective COVID-19 vaccines–something we are all eternally grateful for. Hungarian-born, Karikó excelled academically in science from a young age. After graduating from the University of Szeged she accepted a position at the Biological Research Centre (BRC) in the same city. Lack of funding led her to leave Hungary for the US in 1985, where she has remained since. In 2013 Karikó took a position as senior vice president at BioNTech, overseeing the company’s work on mRNA (messenger RNA vaccines). Her work in the pandemic was crucial and, alongside the Breakthrough Prize, Karikó has been recognised with numerous awards, including the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research (2020), the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (2021), and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2021).
Shafi Goldwasser, Winner of the 2012 A.M. Turing Award
You may think we have the dates wrong here - surely we mean the 2022 prize and not the 2012 one? Well, no, actually, as Shafi Goldwasser is actually the most recent female winner of the A.M. Turing Award! In fact, since the award’s creation in 1966, there have only been three female winners (the other two are Frances Elizabeth Allen in 2006 and Barbara Liskov in 2008). There have been three winners called Robert and five called John though. I’m sure this will come as no surprise to readers of Qissa and it shows that there is still a lot of work to be done in encouraging women into STEM. However a large part of that is celebrating women’s achievements and making sure they are visible to the next generation - representation matters! So, let’s talk about Shafi Goldwasser.
The A.M. Turing Award (sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computing) was named in honour of British mathematician and computer scientist, Alan Mathison Turing. The prize is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing to anyone from around the world. Goldwasser was born in New York to Israeli parents. She attended school in Tel Aviv and then returned to the US to study mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University. She soon became interested in programming and computer science and enrolled in Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley, for her graduate programme. Goldwasser now divides her time as a faculty member between MIT in the US and Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. She is also the recipient of two Gödel Prizes, named in honour of Kurt Gödel in recognition of his major contributions to mathematical logic.
Professor Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck, Winner of the 2019 Abel Prize
The Abel Prize is an International Prize for Mathematics, established by the Norwegian Parliament and awarded yearly. The prize is named after Niels Henrik Abel, whose mathematics have served as a base for many major technological breakthroughs, including the birth of the internet. Since starting the prize in 2002, there has only been one female winner, and that was Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck in 2019. Uhlenbeck was interested in science from a young age, but her interest in mathematics grew when she started university. Originally planning to study physics at the University of Michigan, she came to realise the intellectual challenge of pure mathematics suited her more.
Uhlenbeck has an impressive history of leading the way when it comes to female representation in the field. For her postgraduate study she was already well aware of the discrimination and misogyny that she would face at prestigious schools such as Harvard, which were very male-heavy, so she enrolled instead at Brandeis University where she received a generous scholarship. Similarly to Shafi Goldwasser, Uhlenbeck taught at both MIT and Berkeley but throughout her career, she moved on from jobs when they didn’t serve her or didn’t take her seriously. In 1990 Uhlenbeck was the second woman ever to give a Plenary Lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians, the largest and most important gathering of its kind in the world. The first woman to give the lecture was almost 60 years before, in 1932.
Uhlenbeck, though now retired, remains a staunch advocate for greater gender diversity in mathematics and in science.
‘It is not maths that is hard. It’s life.’ - Karen Uhlenbeck
Dr Jyotirmayee Dash, Winner of the 2020 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize
The purpose of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize is to recognise outstanding Indian work in science and technology. Bhatnagar himself was a chemist and academic who lived from 1894 to 1955 (note another prize named after a male figure, where are all our female-name prizes at?!). The annual prize covers a range of disciplines, from medical sciences to earth and ocean sciences and comes with a prize fund of five lakhs.
The prize is open to those up to 45 years of age and in 2020, Dr Jyotirmayee Dash was the only female winner of the twelve selected. In 2021 there were no female winners and, at the time of writing, winners for the 2022 prize have not been announced. Dash is currently a professor at Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Kolkata, with research interests in topics related to organic chemistry and chemical biology in general. Previously she has been a research fellow at three European Universities; Freie Universität Berlin, ESPCI Paris and the University of Cambridge.
