STEM Cards
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Science
Bell Burnell’s father was an architect, who was one of the designers for the Armagh Planetarium - he encouraged her to pursue a career in astronomy. Later, when she attended a prep course through Lurgan College, a place with policies that restricted women from studying science, her parents (and others) challenged those policies and enabled her to study what she wanted to.
Katherine Johnson
Math
By the age of 13, this STEM innovator was attending the high school on the campus of West Virginia State College. When the school decided to integrate its graduate schools in 1939, Katherine and two others were selected to be the first black students offered spots at West Virginia University.
Euphemia Lofton Haynes
Math
Haynes was born in 1890, to a dentist father and a mother very active in the Catholic church. In 1930, she received a master’s degree in education, and founded the math department at the University of the District of Columbia, which focused most of its work on educating black teachers.