American women biologists

Cara Louise Santa Maria (born October 19, 1983) is an American science communicator. She hosts the podcast Talk Nerdy and co-hosts The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast, and was a co-host of TechKnow on Al Jazeera America.

Xiaowei Zhuang (simplified Chinese: 庄小威; traditional Chinese: 莊小威; pinyin: Zhuāng Xiǎowēi; born January 1972) is a Chinese-American biophysicist who is the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. She received a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing super-resolution imaging techniques that get past the diffraction limits of traditional light microscopes, allowing scientists to visualize small structures within living cells. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019 and was awarded a Vilcek Foundation Prize in Biomedical Science in 2020.

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Petra Alexander; March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011) was an American evolutionary theorist, biologist, science author, educator, and science popularizer, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria. Margulis was also the co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, and was the principal defender and promulgator of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker.

Daniell "Danni" Washington is an American activist, artist and presenter who campaigns for cleaner, plastic-free oceans. She founded the Not-for-Profit Big Blue & You, and presents the STEM-themed TV show Xploration Nature Knows Best.

Lynn Justine Rothschild (born May 11, 1957) is an evolutionary biologist and astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, and was a consulting Professor at Stanford University, where she taught Astrobiology and Space Exploration. She is an adjunct professor at Brown University. At Ames, her research has focused on how life, particularly microbes, has evolved in the context of the physical environment, both on Earth and potentially beyond our planet's boundaries. Since 2007 she has studied the effect of UV radiation on DNA synthesis, carbon metabolism and mutation/DNA repair in the Rift Valley of Kenya and the Bolivian Andes, and also in high altitude experiments atop Mt. Everest, in balloon payloads with BioLaunch. Currently she is the principal investigator of a synthetic biology payload on an upcoming satellite mission.

Kathleen Hallisey "Kate" Rubins (born October 14, 1978) is a NASA astronaut. She became the 60th woman to fly in space when she launched on a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station on July 7, 2016. She returned to Earth on October 30, 2016 aboard a Soyuz. She was a crew member of Expedition 48 and Expedition 49 of the International Space Station.

Flossie Wong-Staal (August 27, 1947–July 8, 2020), née Wong Yee Ching (Chinese: 黄以静; pinyin: Huáng Yǐjìng), was a Chinese-American virologist and molecular biologist. She was the first scientist to clone HIV and determine the function of its genes, which was a major step in proving that HIV is the cause of AIDS. From 1990 to 2002, she held the Florence Riford Chair in AIDS Research at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She was co-founder and, after retiring from UCSD, she became the Chief Scientific Officer of Immusol, which was renamed iTherX Pharmaceuticals in 2007 when it transitioned to a drug development company focused on hepatitis C, and continued as Chief Scientific Officer.

Elsa Salazar Cade (born 1952 in San Antonio, Texas) is a Mexican American science teacher and entomologist.

Munira Adnan Basrai is an American geneticist researching genome stability and cell cycle regulation in yeast and human cancers. She is a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute.