Women Scientists From The United States

"With the three-fingered hand? This was – well, I forget the name of the professor in the mechanical-engineering department. He passed away too. I kind of outlive all of my collaborators, but I think the student who designed it was Abramson, if I remember, three-fingered hand with a palm, and then we put some tactile pressure sensors on that, so that allow us to find where you are connecting. And actually, Ken Goldberg, who is here a professor, did his master degree with me on using these tactile sensors for recognition purposes. So, I also during that time connected with psychologists, who were prominent in this tactile perception. One of them was Susan Letterman, who is an outstanding professor-scientist in tactile perception at Queens University in Canada. And then she connected me with another professor, Roberta Klatzky, who is a professor at CMU in the psychology department, and we had a very fruitful collaboration. I learned quite a bit from these two people on how people perceive that – for example, people have certain procedures, motoric procedures when they want to find out how hard something is or what is the surface texture, and so there are these modules that people – procedures that people use for exploring. They called it “exploratory procedures.”"

"When I think about the skills that served me best, being able to do improv was a huge part of that “It teaches you to think on your feet and also teaches you a whole lot about teamwork."

"I was always interested in understanding the natural world, even as a child. I wondered if milk was a pure liquid or whether it was a mixture of things in water, at about age 8. In later schooling, physics seemed boring, biology was messy, and chemistry was just right."

"I was like wishing I had a time machine, and I could go back to myself and like, punch myself in the face, actually. It wasn’t even like say no, it was like, physically remind myself that I didn’t like to do that."

"The longer each mission becomes, the better we can understand the risks of space travel,We hope that this mission will provide NASA with solid data on how best to select and support a flight crew that will work cohesively as a team while in space."

"There are more tasks to do than there are time to do them."

"So many problems in society have a technical solution rooted in chemistry: sustainable energy, food security, clean water, personalised medicine."

"NASA is systematically checking off all the prerequisites for a long duration mission, and a series of HI-SEAS missions were launched in 2012 to investigate crew composition and cohesion,"

"For example, in the real world when you send an email and get a response in a week, that’s generally fine,” . “But when you’re in an analog and someone doesn’t get back to you within 24 hours, it’s torture. You feel abandoned.”"

"It is possible to convey the fundamental aspects of all the science that we do in a cultural context that’s relevant for the people. That’s probably the most important thing that we do in science—to make it real and important for the people that we’re speaking to."

"Well, in those days there were no CCD cameras, so it was a regular camera like yours and then attached was a digitizer, which provided you digital images, and then you worked offline on these digital images. And the challenge there was that first of all the memory in computers were very small. We worked on small images, so the resolution was not very good, worked on 64 by 64 pixels or at best 128 by 128 pixels, so the resolution was rough, and in texture you really need a higher resolution in order to capture the local properties, so that was a challenge. Technology just wasn’t there. Everything had to be made in the lab. We had to build digitizers and deal with swapping the memory to disk all the time, because the memory was typically 64K or so or even – then later on I worked on PDP-11, which had a 32K memory, the cache, so it was very different time, and therefore the approaches you took were quite different than today people use millions of pictures and do statistical analysis, very different."

"That's right. It's a specialized pantry. It has to be shelf-stable. That means it needs to be able to last the length of the mission without go bad. But yeah, essentially that's what we're doing."

"When I talk about substructure to Muslims who have read the Quran, I try to relate it to one of the passages that essentially says (with “we” meaning “God”), “We have created you into nations and tribes so that you’ll get to know each other, not so you’ll despise each other, and the best among you is the best with God consciousness.” It fits into the scientific rationale for my work, and there’s an immediate link. That’s what we in the science community have to build with nonscientists; you have to build these links so that they will embrace the science and use it appropriately."

"The first time you step outside without a helmet, it’s like going from sixties black and white TV to high-definition"

"A very important aspect of being human is to have faith and to have belief, but the science is absolutely essential for our wellbeing as a species, so we should be able to reconcile the two."

"Unfortunately, we as scientists have not done a good job at explaining what evolution is and decoupling it from atheism—it’s really not about religion at all, it’s about the natural world."

"Well, that they have today on the space station tastes great but what they are essentially is individually pre-prepared meals. You'll get sort of a TV dinner chunk to heat up, maybe add some water to and eat. The problem with that is that once you have you pre-prepared, say, individual serving of lasagna, it will stay lasagna for the rest of time. It will never be anything else."

"Well, no. There are many other changes. I mean, of course the speed and the memory size of the computer is phenomenally different, I mean, but the parallel isn’t that the distributed computing is also tremendously big difference and the display systems. At that time we used – when I worked at Stanford we didn’t have even a raster display. It was all just vector displays that displayed only the contours. At the end of my stay at Stanford we got the first raster display, which allowed you to display all the pixels, but in the beginning it was all just displaying contours."

"Any population that has been abused is going to have some issues, and you have to address those issues head-on. Establish rapport, build the trust, and then maintain it, because it can relapse into feelings of oppression very easily."

"“If you really need to go out clubbing on the weekends, you’re going to be pretty miserable in an analog of a long duration."

"I still believe there is a ton of value in getting a college degree. A college environment is so different from a real world work environment and most of us need that interim stage."

"In 15+ years, we’ve expanded our focus and grown the business, helping countless organizations successfully grow and achieve long-term financial sustainability."

"I went into chemistry instead of engineering because I thought engineers drove trains."

"And, I do want to thank the AVS Society again for this recognition."

"It's estimated that 30 percent of type II diabetes patients have NASH [nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, a severe form of fatty liver disease]."

"I had to do what I thought was the most important thing."

"Rockefeller, where she worked for seven years, was an “awesome and inspiring” place to be."

"A lot of people opposed our civil rights efforts. I had to do what I thought was the most important thing. That’s all there was to it."

"Doesn't matter where you are from or what you look like. Doesn't matter if you're poor. A human being can learn and can achieve whatever they set out to do (or come near to it). I've spent my life studying human potential—and stretching my own.Don't give up. No matter how bad or scary it gets. Not even when you ask yourself "What am I doing here?""

"Because of my family and our community, my childhood was unique. I never learned what I couldn’t do — as a child, as a woman, or as a black person."

"I’m type O-positive. What type are you?"

"I ruined Christmas for everyone because I couldn’t figure out how a reindeer could fly. I mean, they just aren’t built for flying, anyone could see that. So I had to reject either the truthfulness of adults or the conclusions of my own mind."

"thought that it had to be a tall, pink man that interacted with the astronauts, and that nobody was going to listen to a little brown woman."

"In those days, it was common for a woman to be addressed as ‘Miss’ even though she had earned a Ph.D. degree."

"When I first went to MIT I thought I would be working for Bob Brown in fluid mechanic simulation, because my undergraduate thesis was on the Newtonian fluid flow simulation, and my undergraduate research advisor graduated from Washington, Seattle, working for Bruce Finlayson."

"Courage is like — it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging."

"I'd always had an interest in children. Always, from the time I was very small. I'd always thought I wanted to work with children, and psychology seemed a good field."

"[was] the most marvellous learning experience I have ever had -- in the whole sense of urgency, you know, of breaking down the segregation, and the whole sense of really, blasphemy, to blacks, was brought very clearly to me in that office."

"We found the children really didn't want to be black or even brown, then you began to wonder about the whole field of education, and what did it mean that all these children were in one place? You know, what kind of situation is this, that they're isolated from whites, and they can never learn that they're just as good as whites, they're just as bright as whites. They'll always think they're inferior. They'll always think that whites are superior to them."

"I work and work and still it seems I have nothing done."

"I can admit now, in retrospect, that when you’re a Black female and you’re the only one in a particular situation, when something happens, you don’t know whether to view it through a lens of racism or not. You can’t tell because there aren’t other people who look like you. You don’t know if what is happening to you is because of your race or not."

"Science fairs “serve as a natural breeding ground for budding scientists” and “as a continual source of female and minority science-minded students."

"My mother was executive director of the Los Angeles Girl Scout Council. She was a leader, she knew how to interact with people, and she believed deeply in higher education. She would wake me up every morning and say, ‘You can be anything you want to be.’ If you grow up with that kind of confidence, it has a profound influence on the rest of your life."

"Too many young blacks believe that the field of meteorology is not open to them; still others are not even aware that the field exists, Society, too, has a moral obligation to put aside the past myths about black Americans not only in the meteorological field but in all of the technical fields."

"Too often girls and minorities get discouraged early in high school from pursuing a career in the atmospheric sciences"

"I have heard other women and people of color say that we feel like we have to work harder to prove that we know what we’re talking about. I got to where I am because I worked harder, I dug deeper, and I learned how to bring more people into the conversation and to see my point of view."

"We will advance knowledge, economic prosperity and social justice by welcoming and inspiring inquisitive minds from all backgrounds."

"It is a privilege to be in leadership, and we are indeed in service to people."

"All hell broke loose at the station when our weather guy robbed the bank, and they needed someone who was there to fill in for the day,"

"I do hope they recognize that I care deeply about Trinity and trying to make it a stronger institution, that fundamentally I want to leave the place better than it was when I came. It isn’t about me; it is about a better Trinity and my hopes for higher education being better and stronger for the country."