Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Margaret Ebunoluwa "Maggie" Aderin-Pocock,

MBE is a British space scientist & TV Personality.
Aderin-Pocock has worked for the ministry of
defence as well as working at Imperial college
London with the group developing a high-
resolution spectrograph for the Gemini telescope
in Chile.
Aderin-Pocock is well known for her passion for
science and is extremely committed to inspiring
the next generation. In 2009 she was awarded an
MBE for her services to science and education.
Aderin-Pocock is currently a co-presenter on the
BBC program The Sky at Night.
Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
 Benjamin Banneker
1731 – 1806

Benjamin Banneker was born in 1731,

Maryland USA. As free black man he was self-
educated in astronomy and maths.

He assisted in surveying the territory of the

construction of the nation’s capital. He was an
active writer of almanacs and exchanged
letters with Thomas Jefferson, politely
challenging him to do what he could to ensure
racial equality.
 Dr. Kitaw Ejigu
1948 – 2006

Kitaw Ejigu was born in Ethiopia in 1948.

Following studies in Ethiopia and Japan he
completed his doctorate in space vehicle
systems engineering in the US.

He worked for NASA as a system engineer and

space scientist, then with Rockwell International
and Boeing, working on the Space Shuttle.
 Dr. Cheick Modibo Diarra

Diarra was born in French Sudan, now Mali. He

studied maths, physics and mechanics in Paris,
completed his Masters in aerospace engineering
and doctorate in mechanical engineering in the
US. Working for JPL he has been involved with
planetary and solar missions such as Magellan,
Ulysses and Galileo.

He was Director of Education and Public

Outreach for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

He was Acting Prime Minister of Mali from April

to December 2012.
 Srinivasa Ramanujan
1887 – 1920

Born in India, with no formal training Ramanujan went

on to make extraordinary contributions to mathematics.
Once his skills were recognised by Indian
mathematicians, he became wider known and entered a
partnership with English mathematician , G. H. Hardy.
Ramanujan complied nearly 3900 results, nearly all of
which have since been proven correct – most notably
the Ramanujan prime number and the Ramanujan theta
function. The notion of “taxicab numbers” was
developed after Hardy commented on his taxi number
1729 being rather dull, however Ramanujan replied that
"it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number
expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different
ways."
 Mary Jackson
1921 – 2005

Within two years of joining NASA, Jackson was promoted

from research mathematician to the Compressibility
Research Division and five years later she was promoted
to aerospace engineer. After working at the Theoretical
Aerodynamics Branch of the Subsonic-Transonic
Aerodynamics Division at Langley, she was later assigned
to work directly with the flight test engineers at NASA.
Jackson advised women on the benefits of changing
their titles from ‘Mathematician’ to ‘Engineer’ and was
one of the first women to do this.
After 34 years at NASA, Jackson reached the highest
level of engineer that was possible for her. She then
opted to retrain as an Equal Opportunity Specialist. She
served as both the Federal Women’s Program Manager
in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, and as the
Affirmative Action Program Manager.
BGM photo archives
 Dr. George Robert Carruthers

George Robert Carruthers is a physicist and

space scientist. He was born in 1939 in Ohio and
brought up in Chicago.

He has worked almost entirely for the Naval

Research Lab, Washington DC working on far
ultraviolet astronomy. He was awarded a patent
for an "Image Converter for Detecting
Electromagnetic Radiation Especially in Short
Wave Lengths.” His cameras have been flown on
missions from Apollo 16 to the Space Shuttle.
 Dr. Ahmed Zewail
1946-2016

Egyptian-born Ahmed Zewail was a founder of

“femtochemistry”, the ultrafast spectroscopy of
chemical reactions. He won the 1999 Nobel
Prize for Chemistry.

"I never ever believed that one day I would get a

call from Sweden as a boy," he said after
receiving the Nobel. "I had passion about
science. My mother said I was going to burn the
house (with chemistry experiments).”

In 2009 Zewail was appointed US Science Envoy

to the middle east.
 Dr. Mae Jemison
http://www.drmae.com/

Jemison trained as an engineer, social scientist,

dancer and medical doctor spent 6 years as
NASA astronaut. She was the first woman of
colour to go into space aboard a joint space
shuttle mission with the Japanese space
agency.
Jemison is an entrepreneur and has founded
two technology companies and the non-profit
Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence
which designs and implements STEM
education experiences.
She was the first astronaut to appear on Star
Trek.
NASA
 Professor John Remedios

Professor John Remedios is the Head of the Earth

Observation Science group at The University of
Leicester and the Director of the National Centre for
Earth Observation.
He is actively involved in satellite missions as well as
being the chair of the UK Space Agency Earth
Observation Advisory Committee, chair of the Defra
UK Copernicus Atmosphere Networking Group and a
member of the NERC Pool of Chairs.
Professor Remedios is a Co-Director of G-step,
promoting Earth Observation data for use by East
Midlands, national and international businesses.
Professor Remedios has worked in outreach projects
such as Blue Marble and FORMAT-EO.
University of Leicester
 Katherine Johnson

At West Virginia State College Katherine

Johnson took every maths course the college
offered and new maths courses were added
specifically for Katherine. She graduated summa
cum laude in 1937, with degrees in maths and
French, aged just 18.
Johnson worked at NASA from 1953 – 1983,
during this time she calculated flight trajectories
for Mercury and Apollo missions. John Glenn
(astronaut) asked for her personally and refused
to fly unless Katherine verified the calculations,
because he didn’t trust the computers’
calculations as they were new technology.
NASA
 Professor Saiful Islam

Saiful Islam grew up in north London, and studied

Chemistry at University College London. He now
leads the Energy Materials research group at the
University of Bath and holds a Royal Society Wolfson
Research Merit Award.

His research involves computer modelling of new

sustainable materials for lithium and sodium
batteries, and perovskite solar cells.

Saiful Islam is committed to addressing under-

representation in science and is a member of the
Diversity Committee of the Royal Society.

He is active in outreach and will be presenting the

2016 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.
University of Bath
 Dr. Claudia Alexander
1959-2015

Born in Canada and raised in America, Claudia Alexander

studied geophysics and space physics at the University of
California and space plasma physics at the University of
Michigan.
Her research spanned topics in planetary and Earth
sciences from plate tectonics to comets and the Solar
wind. Dr. Alexander was Principal Investigator for the NASA
Galileo mission, which revolutionised our view of Jupiter
and its moons.
Her name has been given to a topological feature on
comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko surveyed by the
Rosetta mission on which she was a project manager.
Claudia Alexander was an advocate for diversity in STEM,
chairing the Diversity Committee of the American
Geophysical Union and as an active member of the
Association for Women Geoscientists.
NASA
 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
1910-1995

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born in 1910 in

Lahore. He studied in India and in the UK, going on to
spend most of his career at the University of Chicago,
USA.
Professor Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Physics in 1983 for studies of the physical processes
important to the structure and evolution of stars.
This work led to an understanding of the later
evolutionary stages of massive stars, including black
holes. He established that the mass of a white dwarf
could not exceed 1.44 times that of the Sun, now known
as the Chandrasekhar Limit.
He received many accolades for his work, including the
Gold Medal of the RAS, the Copley Medal of the Royal
Society and the US National Medal of Science, and the
NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory bears his name.
University of Chicago
 Dr. Endawoke Yizengaw
https://www2.bc.edu/endawoke-kassie/Biography.html

Dr. Yizengaw is a space physicist who currently

works as a senior research scientist at Boston
College. He is recognised for his work on
ionospheric tomography, and is currently
leading a project known as AMBER (African
Meridian B-field Education and Research).
Named after his hometown, AMBER seeks to
improve the global understanding of equatorial
ionospheric dynamics through the use of
ground-based magnetometers. Dr. Yizengaw
has received several prestigious rewards for the
creativity and quality of his research, and is a
founding member of the Ethiopian Geophysical
Union International (EGUI).
Institute for Scientific Research Boston College
 Dorothy Vaughan
1910 – 2008

Vaughan was hired to work at the National

Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA),
now NASA, in 1943 and was assigned to the
West Area Computers (WACs). This was a work
group composed entirely of African-American
female mathematicians.
In 1949, she became the head of the WACs and
NASA's first African-American manager. She
specialised in electronic computing and
FORTRAN programming and contributed to the
space program through her work on the Scout
Project (Solid Controlled Orbital Utility Test
system).
The human computer project
 Dr. Nikku Madhusudhan

Dr Madhusudhan is an Indian astrophysicist and is

currently a Lecturer at Cambridge University. He is
an expert in theoretical modelling and
observations of exoplanet atmospheres. His major
results include high precision measurements of
water and carbon in exoplanet atmospheres.

In 2014 he was awarded the Vainu Bappu Gold

Medal by the Astronomical Society of India for his
contribution to astrophysics.
 Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/

Tyson was born and raised in New York. He completed a

BA in Physics at Harvard and earned his PhD in
astrophysics in Columbia.
Tyson has twice been appointed by Bush to serve on
commissions, looking in to the future of the US
Aerospace industry in 2001 and the implementation of
US space exploration policy in 2004. In 2006, Tyson was
placed on NASA’s advisory council.
Tyson is well known for his communication of science to
the public. As well as numerous academic publications,
Tyson has published 10 books and been involved in many
TV series’ as an executive editor and on camera as host
and narrator – most notably for Cosmos: A SpaceTime
Odyssey and StarTalk. Tyson is the fifth head of the
world-renowned Hayden Planetarium in New York City.
Photo by David Gamble, 2008.
 Professor Hiranya Peiris

Professor Hiranya Peiris is a prominent

Cosmologist studying the Cosmic Microwave
Background at University College London. She was
born in Sri Lanka, and completed her
undergraduate in the UK and her PhD In the USA.

She is a member of the WMAP collaboration as

well as the Planck Collaboration and the Dark
energy Survey. She also serves as an editor for
Physics Letters B and is a Vice-President of the
Royal Astronomical Society. She is a winner of
numerous prizes and was selected as one of the
RAS “21 female fellows to watch in the 21st
century”.
 Dr. Olivier Godet

Olivier Godet is an astrophysicist at Université Paul

Sabatier/IRAP in Toulouse, with a focus on
instrumentation for space missions. He heads the
institute’s working group preparing the X-ray
integral field unit for the ESA Athena Observatory
due for launch in 2028, and is one of the leads for
the upcoming SVOM mission to study gamma-ray
bursts.
Born in France, Olivier received his PhD at CESR in
2004 and then spent several post-doctoral years in
our department here at Leicester as calibration
scientist for the NASA Swift mission. He returned
to France where he is making key contributions to
missions exploring the transient Universe.
 Professor Arthur Walker
1936 – 2001

Prof. Arthur B. C. Walker Jr was born in Cleveland,

Ohio, and started his scientific career at the US Air
Force. After that, he was professor at Stanford
University from 1974-2001, where he mainly worked
on the physics of the Sun. His main interest was in X-
ray and far-UV observations of the sun from space,
and the development of sensitive optics for X-ray
telescopes.

His first PhD student, Sally Ride, became the first

American woman in space. Walker served on the
presidential committee investigating the Challenger
space shuttle disaster.
Walker was a leader in the community of black
physicists.