Women in chemistry


This is a list of women chemists. It should include those who have been important to the development or practice of chemistry. Their research or application has made significant contributions in the area of basic or applied chemistry.

Nobel Laureates

Source:
Eight women have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded annually since 1901 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Marie Curie was the first woman to receive the prize in 1911, which was her second Nobel Prize. Her prize in chemistry was for her "discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element." Irene Joliot-Curie, Marie's daughter, became the second woman to be awarded this prize in 1935 for her discovery of artificial radioactivity. Dorothy Hodgkin won the prize in 1964 for the development of protein crystallography. Among her significant discoveries are the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12. Forty five years later, Ada Yonath shared the prize with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz for the study of the structure and function of the ribosome. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A Doudna won the 2020 prize in chemistry “for the development of a method for genome editing.” Charpentier and Doudna are the first women to share the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Wolf Laureates

Three women have been awarded the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, they are:
  • 2006 – Ada Yonath "for ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis.
  • 2022 – Bonnie L. Bassler and Carolyn R. Bertozzi "for their seminal contributions to understanding the chemistry of cellular communication and inventing chemical methodologies to study the role of carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins in such biological processes."

Chemical elements

In the periodic table of elements, two chemical elements are named after a female scientist:

List of women chemists

The following list is split into the centuries when the majority of the scientist's work was performed. The scientist's listed may be born and perform work outside of the century they are listed under.

19th century

20th century

21st century