Partnership Scholars Program is happy to join the Women’s History Month celebration.                                We highlight 6 women scholars from different career fields that demonstrate the power, resilience and intelligence of women. PSP is happy to empower our young women scholars and they will one day be recognized for their contributions to society.

Read below for more information on the 6 brilliant scholars.

Mrs. Katherine Johnson was born in 1918 in West Virginia. Her remarkable life is full of firsts; in 1939 she was selected with two African American men to join Virginia State’s first integrated graduate school program. Mrs. Johnson worked at NASA and was the first woman in the Flight Research Division to receive credit as an author of a research report. She’s well known for calculations that helped synchronize Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. In 2015, at age 97, Mrs. Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom form President Obama and in 2016 she and her NASA team were the subject of the hit movie Hidden Figures. You can read more about Mrs. Johnson here.

Mrs. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Columbia Law School, and became an advocate for the fair treatment of women, working with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Women’s Rights Project. She was appointed by President Carter to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1980 and was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton in 1993. She is the second woman to serve as a Supreme Court Justice. You can read more about Mrs. Bader Ginsburg here.

Chien-Shiung Wu is a scientist known as “the First Lady of Physics”. Ms. Wu was born in China in 1912 and she was inspired by Ms. Marie Curie, she completed her undergraduate degree in physics in 1934. After completing her undergraduate education in China, Ms. Wu continued her physics studies at University of California, Berkeley. During her career, she earned many accolades including the Comstock Prize in Physics (1964), the Bonner Prize (1975), the National Medal of Science (1975), and the Wolf Prize in Physics (inaugural award, 1978). Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a standard reference for nuclear physicists. Ms. Wu later became a professor at Columbia University where she remained for the rest of her career. She passed away in 1997 at the age of 84. You can read more about Ms. Wu here.

Ms. Madeleine Albright was born in 1937 in Prague. As a child, she moved with her family to the United States. After studying at Wellesley College and Columbia University, Ms. Albright became the American ambassador to the United Nations, and three years later she was appointed secretary of the state in the Clinton administration, making her the first woman to have ever held the position. Ms. Albright served in that capacity for several years before leaving in 2001 to pursue other projects. You can read more about Ms. Albright here.

Ms. Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia in 1982. Her family fled persecution and they were in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years. She was 12 years old when she and her family relocated to the United States. She went to North Dakota State University and Ms. Omar became a Twin Cities policy analyst, organizer, public speaker and advocate. In 2016 she was elected as the Minnesota House Representative for District 60B, making her the highest-elected Muslim Somali-American public official in the United States. You can read more about Ms. Omar here.

Ms. Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954, the third child and only daughter in a family of seven children. She studied at Loyola University of Chicago and the University of Iowa. Ms. Cisneros is an activist poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist and artist. Writing for over 50 years, her work explores the lives of the working-class. Her classic coming-of-age novel, The House on Mango Street has sold over six million copies, has been translated into more than twenty languages, and is required reading in elementary, high school, and university curricula across the U.S. Ms. Cisneros founded the Macondo Foundation, an association of socially engaged writers, and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, a grant-giving institution that serves Texas writers. You can read more about Ms. Cisneros here.