From Sally Ride to Grace Hopper to Shirley Ann Jackson, get to know some of the trailblazers of science, technology, engineering, and math through the libraries’ collections. As Women’s History Month wraps up we thought we’d take a chance to highlight some resources on trailblazing women of STEM.

Newer acquisitions include a variety of print books such as The Innovators by Walter Isaacson which profiles many innovators including Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s.
We also have Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age by Kurt W. Beyer. Hopper’s greatest technical achievement was to create the tools that would allow humans to communicate with computers in terms other than ones and zeroes.

Additional newer print titles of interest are Rocket Girl by George D. Morgan, and Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks.

We have audiobooks available on CD including Hidden Figures by Margo Lee Shetterly which shares the true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space and was the basis for the award-winning film by the same name. The print book and blu-ray version of the film are also in our collection.

Another audiobook of interest is Glass Universe by Dava Sobel. Glass Universe tells the story of the group of women who dedicated their lives to studying and interpreting over 500,000 glass photographic plates housed at the Harvard College Observatory depicting phenomena of our universe such as galaxies, novae, and nebulae.

The Libraries’ newest streaming film collection, Kanopy, has a variety of documentaries on trailblazers of STEM. One such is entitled DNA: Secret of Photo 51. While many are familiar with the work of James Watson and Francis Crick to discover the double helix structure of DNA, fewer know of the contributions of another biologist, Rosalind Franklin. Watch this, and other streaming movies and documentaries from on campus or from the comfort of your own home.

You might watch a BBC documentary on Hedy Lamarr from the Films on Demand Extraordinary Women collection. Hedy Lamarr was a beautiful movie star, best known for her work in the 1930s and ‘40s. She was also an inventor who co-created a “Secret Communications System.” Lamarr realized that transmitting radio signals on hopping frequencies would help prevent detection of radio-guided weapons during WWII. Learn more about this invention and her fascinating life in this FOD streaming documentary.

We hope you will join us in learning more about these, and other, extraordinary women of STEM on our online guide at https://libguides.madisoncollege.edu/womenoftech.