Professor Ngalula Sandrine Mubenga

Professor Ngalula Sandrine Mubenga is an electrical engineer whose pioneering research into battery management systems identified ways to increase the capacity and longevity of batteries.

Mubenga was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and had a medical scare aged 17 that drove home to her the importance of reliable energy. She had been hospitalised in Kikwit with appendicitis and needed urgent surgery, but the city had run out of power. It took three agonising days for Mubenga’s father to find enough fuel for the surgery to be performed – an experience that she has said inspired her to pursue a career in electrical engineering.

Today, Mubenga is an engineer and assistant professor of electrical engineering technology at the University of Toledo in the US, whose research focuses on sustainable and renewable energy (including solar power, electric vehicles and battery management).

She conducted her award-winning research into batteries as a doctoral student at the University of Toledo, where she developed a new kind of equaliser (a tool that can be used to rejuvenate tired batteries or to prevent batteries from becoming tired). Mubenga invented a bilevel equaliser, the first to combine an active and low-cost passive equaliser, that could be used to extend the life of lithium-ion batteries.

Mubenga is also an entrepreneur and philanthropist. In 2011, she founded SMIN Power Group LLC, a company that aims to help Africans overcome power outages. SMIN designs and installs renewable energy devices and solar systems – including public lighting and water pumping projects – in communities, schools and hospitals across the DRC. It also provides financial support to African students who are studying science and working on climate change solutions.

In 2018, Mubenga launched the STEM DRC initiative (where she still serves as president), a not-for-profit organisation that works to stimulate social and economic development in the DRC by promoting STEM education and providing college scholarships for Congolese students.

Mubenga currently leads electrification initiatives in the DRC as Director General of the country’s Electricity Regulatory Agency, a role to which she was appointed by the government in 2020. Previously, she served on the board of directors for Société Nationale d’Électricité (the DRC’s national energy company). She now balances her position as a DRC government official with her post at UoT, where she continues to teach and conduct research.

Mubenga’s awards and honours include being recognised as one of the Most Important Black Women Engineers by DesignNews and Engineer of the Year by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2018. The same year, her battery research won the IEEE National Aerospace and Electronics Conference Best Poster Award.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @NgalulaPe
Website: drmubenga.com

Further Reading

• Ngalula Mubenga, Wikipedia
• Women Champions in the Energy Sector, Power Africa 

Written by Moya Crockett, with thanks to Stylist for their support.

Bessie Coleman

Bessie Coleman was an American aviator. The first Black person and person of Native American descent to earn an international pilot’s licence, she made the first public flight by a Black woman in the United States.

Coleman was born on 26 January 1892 into a family of sharecroppers in Texas. Noted as an outstanding maths student from an early age, she could only afford to attend college for one term before dropping out. While working in a barber shop in Chicago in her early 20s, she met pilots recently returned from World War I, whose stories of flying across Europe set her imagination alight.

At the time, however, flight schools in the US refused to accept women, Black people and Native Americans as students (Coleman’s father was of mixed African-American and Native descent). When Coleman’s brother teased her that she’d never fly a plane like the French female pilots he’d met during the war, she decided that a trip to France was her best route into the sky.

Coleman saved and obtained sponsorships to go to France for flight school, travelling to Paris in November 1920. She earned her pilot’s licence in just seven months, becoming the first Black woman and first self-identified Native American to do so in June 1921. That September, she returned to the States, but quickly realised that earning a living from aviation would be difficult; commercial flights were not yet widespread in the US. The best way to earn a living from civil aviation, she determined, was competitive stunt flying.

Keen to hone her skills in a highly dangerous field, and still unable to find a flying instructor willing to take on a Black woman in the US, Coleman returned to France to complete an advanced aviation course in February 1922. She spent time in the Netherlands with Anthony Fokker, one of the world’s most high-profile aircraft designers, and received training from one of his company’s chief pilots in Germany. On 3 September 1922, Coleman made the first public flight by a Black woman in the US, piloting a Curtiss JN-4D Jenny at Curtiss Field on Long Island, New York.

Coleman’s performances involving dramatic tricks in the air were hugely popular, and she became a media sensation known as “Queen Bess” and “Brave Bessie”. Her dream was to establish a school for African-American aviators, but she didn’t live long enough to see this ambition realised: she died in a plane crash in 1926, aged just 34. Her legacy, though, lived on. When NASA astronaut Dr Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman to travel into space in September 1992, she carried a photo of Coleman with her.

Further Reading

• Bessie Coleman, Wikipedia
• Bessie Coleman, National Air And Space Museum 
• Bessie Coleman, Kerri Lee Alexander & Rebecca Ljungren, National Women’s History Museum, December 2022
• Overlooked No More: Bessie Coleman, Pioneering African-American Aviatrix, Daniel E Slotnik, The New York Times, 11 December 2019
• For Pilot Bessie Coleman, Every ‘No’ Got Her Closer to ‘Yes’, David Kindy, Smithsonian Magazine, 21 January 2022
• Bessie Coleman, Julia Lauria-Blum, Cradle of Aviation Museum, 7 June 2019
• Who was Bessie Coleman and why does she still matter?, Al Jazeera, 26 January 2017

Written by Moya Crockett, with thanks to Stylist for their support.

Professor Rose Leke

Professor Rose Leke is an internationally renowned immunologist and parasitologist who has dedicated her career to helping eradicate malaria. Working with Dr Diane Taylor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, her research has advanced understandings of how malaria during pregnancy can harm the health of both mothers and foetuses. She has also dedicated many years to working on polio elimination programmes and advocating for better representation for women in STEM.

As a young girl growing up in rural Cameroon in the 1950s, Leke experienced regular bouts of malaria as a normal part of life. Her interest in medicine was initially sparked by the treatment she received for a lung abscess as a child: she wanted to understand exactly what she had gone through, as well as how she could help others experiencing health problems. In secondary school, Leke noticed how many pregnant women in her community were dying of malaria and decided to pursue a career in mitigating the harm caused by the disease.

In 1966, Leke left Cameroon for undergraduate studies in the US, followed by a masters and a PhD in parasitology in Canada. She then returned to Cameroon to research onchocerciasis, or river blindness. “To me, the choice was never going to be oncho, I had to do work in malaria,” she said later. Malaria was what she felt she “was supposed to do”.

That goal was certainly achieved. Leke has worked on malaria elimination programmes, served as a member of multiple national and international malaria response committees, and held the positions of Executive Director of the Cameroon Coalition Against Malaria and president of the Federation of African Immunological Societies. Her primary research focus is the immunology of parasitic infections, with emphasis on malaria in pregnant women, and she has worked for decades to improve clinical care for pregnant women suffering from the disease.

In the early 1990s, Leke began her decades-long collaboration with Taylor. The women’s research has made it easier to diagnose placental malaria and shown how the presence of the malaria parasite within the placenta can affect the immune development of newborns. Leke has also worked extensively on polio elimination, inspired partly by the experiences of close relatives who suffered with the disease.

Leke retired from senior university positions in 2013, when she was head of the Department of Medicine and Director of the Biotechnology Centre at the University of Yaoundé I in Cameroon. Two years later, she established the Higher Institute for Growth in Health Research for Women Consortium – furthering a lifelong commitment to improving gender equality in science and global health leadership. To date, the mentorship initiative has supported over 100 young women scientists in Cameroon.

Today, Leke is Emeritus Professor of Immunology and Parasitology at the University of Yaoundé I. She also serves as a chair or consultant on several global committees related to malaria and polio, including for the World Health Organization (WHO).

Among many awards, Leke was ceremonially named Queen Mother of the Cameroon Medical Community by the Cameroon Medical Council in 2019 and recognised for her “Achievement in Global Health Leadership” by the Africa Centres for Disease Control & Prevention in 2022. This year, she received the 2023 Virchow Prize for Global Health – honouring her “pioneering infectious disease research towards a malaria-free world and relentless dedication in advancing gender equality”.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @LekeRose

Further Reading

• Rose Leke, Wikipedia
• Interview With Professor Rose Leke: How To Certify A Region As Wild Polio Free, Africa Kicks Out Wild Polio

Written by Moya Crockett, with thanks to Stylist for their support.

Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, Melissa L Sevigny

In the summer of 1938, botanist Elzada Clover and PhD student Lois Jotter set off from the University of Michigan to travel the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious expedition leader and three amateur boatmen. The expedition held a tantalising appeal for Clover and Jotter: no one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, and they were determined to be the first. Journalists and veteran river-runners proclaimed that the motley crew would never make it out alive, but the reputation of the Colorado River as the most dangerous river in the world did not deter the women from their mission. The adventurous expedition is all the more remarkable considering the context of attitudes towards women in botany at the time, which, like many other areas of science, was very much male-dominated. 

Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L Sevigny traces their daring 43-day journey down the Colorado River, during which they meticulously catalogued the thorny plants that thrived in the Grand Canyon’s secret nooks and crannies. Along the way, they chased a runaway boat, ran the river’s most fearsome rapids, and turned the harshest critic of female river-runners into an ally. These brave and pioneering women garnered significant publicity and curiosity at the time for their expedition, and their work has had a lasting impact on the scientific understanding of this unique landscape. Clover and Jotter’s plant list, including four new cactus species, would one day become vital for efforts to protect and restore the river’s ecosystem. 

Brave the Wild River is a joyful and spellbinding adventure story of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk.

About the Author 

Melissa Sevigny is a science journalist and reporter at KNAU (Arizona Public Radio) in Flagstaff, Arizona. She has worked as a science communicator in the fields of planetary science, Western water policy, and sustainable agriculture. Her lyrical nonfiction explores the intersections of science, nature, and history, with a focus on the American Southwest. Sevigny is also the author of Mythical River (University of Iowa Press, 2016) and Under Desert Skies (University of Arizona Press, 2016). She earned a BS in Environmental Science & Policy from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.

You can follow Melissa Sevigny’s work here:

Website: Melissa L. Sevigny – Science Writer (melissasevigny.com)
Twitter: @MelissaSevigny
Bluesky: @melissasevigny.bsky.social

With thanks to Synergy for their support.

Dr Lori Alvord

Dr Lori Arviso Alvord is an American surgeon who became the first Navajo woman to be certified in surgery in 1994. She blends traditional Navajo healing techniques with conventional Western medicine, with the aim of providing Native American people with culturally competent healthcare and accelerating the recovery process for all patients.

Alvord was born in 1958 to a Diné father and White mother on the Navajo reservation of Crownpoint, New Mexico. She initially majored in natural sciences at Dartmouth College but received low grades. Believing she wasn’t clever enough to pursue a STEM career, she switched to a double social sciences major with a minor in Native American studies, graduating in 1979.

However, a neuroanatomy course at college had ignited Alvord’s interest in neurology. She joined a neurobiology clinic as a research assistant, where colleagues encouraged her to apply to medical school. She was accepted into Stanford University Medical School and earned her MD in 1985.

Medical school is always tough, but it posed specific challenges for Alvord, whose training required her to go against some Navajo traditions. She undertook a six-year residency at Stanford University Hospital after her M.D., then began practising as a surgeon with the Indian Health Service in Gallup, New Mexico. In 1994, she earned her board certification as a surgeon – the first Diné or Navajo woman to ever do so.

During her time in Gallup, Alvord cared for her own tribal members and observed that their needs, concerns and traditions often clashed with her conventional Western medical training. She began to develop a new philosophy of surgical care that respects Native American culture. Alvord has been particularly influenced by Navajo beliefs about the importance of harmony. In the context of medicine, this involves paying attention to all aspects of a patient’s life – including their personal relationships and psychological and spiritual wellbeing – rather than trying to address physical ailments in isolation.

Alvord also incorporates Navajo songs, symbols and ceremonial rituals into her practice, recognising that these can ease stress in a way that helps accelerate healing. Respect for nature is central to Alvord’s work, too; she advocates for hospitals “where you can see trees and grass and sky and sun”.

In 1999, Alvord published a bestselling memoir about her surgical career, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear. She has held a number of prestigious academic posts in the US since the 1990s, including assistant professor of surgery and psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School, associate faculty member for the Center for American Indian Health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and associate dean of the Central Michigan University College of Medicine. In 2013, she was nominated to serve as U.S. Surgeon General.

Today, Alvord is chief of staff at Astria Health in Washington in the United States, where she continues to focus on surgical care that incorporates patients’ native culture. She has published research articles in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, and expressed pleasure that mainstream scientific research is beginning to support  some Native philosophies and practices – from meditating to reduce stress and increase immune responses to the benefits of following a high-vegetable, low-meat diet. Her goal, she says, is to “achieve a better way to deliver health care not just for Native people, but for everyone”.

Alvord’s honours include the Wallace Sterling Lifetime Achievement Award from the Stanford Medicine Alumni Association in 2018, and recognition from the Navajo Area Health Board for her “dedication and concern for the quality of healthcare on the Navajo Nation”.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @lori_alvord

Further Reading

• Lori Alvord, Wikipedia
• Dr Lori Arviso Alvord, Changing the Face of Medicine
• Lori Arviso Alvord ’79 hosts lecture on integrating Native and Western medicine, Kent Friel, The Dartmouth, 3 February 2023
• Lori Arviso Alvord, MD: The First Navajo Nation Tribal Member to Be Board Certified in General Surgery, Capt Susan V. Karol, MD, Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons, 4 February 2022
• Dr. Lori Alvord: From Navajo Healing Ceremonies To 21st Century Medicine, New Hampshire Public Radio, 1 August 2014 
• Bridging the Cultural Divide in Medicine, Edna Francisco, Science, 3 December 2004 
• Through Navajo Eyes, Dr Lori Arviso Alvord, Stanford Magazine, January/February 2000

Written by Moya Crockett, with thanks to Stylist for their support.