Author Archives: Stephanie

ALD21: Dr Marjorie Lee Browne, Mathematician and Educator

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Dr Marjorie Lee Browne

Marjorie Lee Browne was the third African-American woman to get a PhD in mathematics, and opened one of the first computer centres at an historically Black university.

Browne studied mathematics at Howard University and graduated cum laude in 1935. She then applied for the graduate program at the University of Michigan for mathematics. She could only attend Michigan during the summer because she was working the rest of the year at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas.

She eventually received a teaching fellowship at Michigan University, meaning she could attend full-time. She completed her dissertation, Studies of One Parameter Subgroups of Certain Topological and Matrix Groups, and completed her doctorate in 1949. After Euphemia Haynes in 1943, and together with Evelyn Boyd Granville, she was one of the first three African-American women to earn a doctorate in mathematics in the US.

She went on to join the faculty of mathematics at North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University, NCCU), and for 25 years she was the only person in the department to have a doctorate. She was department Chair from 1951 until 1970, and retired in 1979.

Browne recognised the importance of computers, and in 1960 she wrote a grant proposal to IBM, winning $60,000 to set up an electronic digital computer centre at NCCU, one of the first at a minority college.

She ran summer institutes to help secondary school teachers develop their own mathematics education, and provided financial support to gifted students. She was the first recipient of the WW Rankin Memorial Award for Excellence in Mathematics Education, presented by the North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The University of Michigan runs the Marjorie Lee Brown Scholars program in her honour.

Further reading

ALD21 Archive: What does ice-cream tell us about chemical engineering? – Yasmin Ali, 2017

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What does ice-cream tell us about chemical engineering? – Yasmin Ali, 2017

Yasmin Ali demonstrates what chemical engineering and ice-cream have in common.

Yasmin is an Energy Engineering Specialist for the government, in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. She has also worked as a chartered chemical engineer in the energy industry, with experience in coal and gas-fired power stations, as well as the UK oil and gas sector.

Outside of work Yasmin is a keen volunteer and dedicates much of her time to promoting engineering at schools, career fairs and festivals, with a variety of organisations including the IET, IChemE, and WES. She is also passionate about informing the public about engineering through the media, and has worked with the BBC’s science unit. Yasmin also enjoys stand-up comedy, music and sports!

You can follow her work here:

Website: http://www.engineeryasmin.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EngineerYasmin
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasmin-ali-a9655426/

Recorded at the Royal Institution, you can watch the rest of the Ada Lovelace Day Live 2017 playlist here.

ALD21 Podcasts: Good Natured, Sofia Castelló y Tickell & Julia Migné

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Good Natured, Sofia Castelló y Tickell & Julia Migné

Good Natured is a Conservation Optimism podcast, where you can listen to uplifting chats that shine a light on conservation challenges. In each episode, Sofia Castelló y Tickell & Julia Migné interview an inspiring conservationist (including a penguinologist. Yes, really.). Their guests come from a variety of backgrounds – artists, scientists, business owners, and activists – and engage with conservation in a variety of ways. They talk about their challenges and successes, and their hopes for the future of nature. 

Recent episodes include: 

  • conservationist Rachel Ashegbofe Ikemeh talking about conserving chimpanzees, the importance of mentorship, and being a woman in the field;
  • penguinologist Tom Hart on the dynamics of polar ecosystems and creating a sense of home in remote places; and,
  • plant ecologist Sara Lil Middleton about seeing beyond the “green carpet” to understand grasses and climate change and her work to promote equality and diversity in the biological sciences.

You can follow their work here:

Twitter: @SofiaAtSea, @JuliaMigne and @ConservOptimism
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sofiacastello and linkedin.com/in/julia-mign%C3%A9-16b80a76
Website: scyt.weebly.com

ALD21: Dr Marian Croak, Engineer

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Dr Marian Croak

Dr Marian Croak is the developer of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and the technology behind “text to donate”. She holds over two hundred patents, of which 125 relate to VOIP.

In the early days of the internet, Croak realised just how revolutionary it would be. She also realised that it was inefficient for her employers, AT&T, to run both a traditional phone network alongside a new digital network for the internet when the internet could be used for both. She and her team experimented with “packetizing” voice, converting the sound into a digital signal that could be carried over the internet.

Croak struggled to convince colleagues that this was an important step forward, as many of them considered the internet to be a fad that would soon fall out of fashion. But she was eventually successful and now VOIP is used on a daily basis by millions to conduct phone calls over the internet.

The use of SMS messages as a way to donate to crisis appeals, or “text to donate”, was also her idea. In 2010, this invention helped to raise $32 million for survivors of the earthquake in Haiti. The “text to donate” technology is also used as “text your vote” for American TV shows such as American Idol.

Croak started her professional career in 1982, working in data services at Bell Laboratories, which was acquired by AT&T in 1984. She joined Google in 2014 and today she is the vice president of engineering for access strategy and emerging markets, where she leads several projects to improve internet technology all over the world.

She has received several awards and serves as a board member for many non-profit organisations. It was announced in 2021 that, together with ophthalmologist Patricia Bath, she will become one of the first two black women to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

You can follow her work here:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marian-croak-926361bb

Further reading

ALD21 Books: The Fossil Hunter, Shelley Emling

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Shelley Emling

The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World, Shelley Emling

At a time when women were excluded from science, a young girl made a discovery that marked the birth of palaeontology and continues to feed the debate about evolution to this day.

Mary Anning was only twelve years old when, in 1811, she discovered the first dinosaur skeleton – of an ichthyosaur – while fossil hunting on the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England. Until Mary’s incredible discovery, it was widely believed that animals did not become extinct. The child of a poor family, Mary became a fossil hunter, inspiring the tongue-twister, “She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore.” She attracted the attention of fossil collectors and eventually the scientific world. Once news of the fossils reached the halls of academia, it became impossible to ignore the truth. Mary’s peculiar finds helped lay the groundwork for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, laid out in his On the Origin of Species. Darwin drew on Mary’s fossilised creatures as irrefutable evidence that life in the past was nothing like life in the present.

A story worthy of Dickens, The Fossil Hunter chronicles the life of this young girl, with dirt under her fingernails and not a shilling to buy dinner, who became a world-renowned palaeontologist. Dickens himself said of Mary: “The carpenter’s daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it.”

Here at last, Shelley Emling returns Mary Anning, of whom Stephen J. Gould remarked, is “probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of palaeontology,” to her deserved place in history.