Celebrating Women’s History Month

Mary Calderone ’39M (MD) was a pioneering advocate for sex education who was both celebrated and vilified for her work during a time a great cultural division over sexuality and feminism.

Vera Micheles Dean served as the founding director of the University’s Non-Western Civilizations program, one of the first such interdisciplinary programs for undergraduates in the country.

The cofounder of the first pediatric nurse practitioner program was also the founding dean of the University of Rochester School of Nursing.

Surviving the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre, Olivia Hooker ’62 (PhD) was the first Black woman to serve in the Coast Guard and became a prominent psychology professor.

Beatrice Amaza Howard ’31, ’33 (MA) earned two degrees at Rochester before embarking on a career as a public school teacher.

The School of Medicine and Dentistry’s first female department chair was honored by the National Women’s Hall of Fame for her work as a scientist and administrator.

Sylvy Kornberg ’38, ’40M (MS), a biochemist most often cited as the wife and the mother of Nobel Prize-winning scientists, but who played a critical role in the discovery of DNA replication.

The professor emerita, known as the “mother of infrared astronomy,” had a profound impact on research into astronomical phenomena and the origins of the universe and was a pioneer for women in science.

Donna Strickland ’89 (PhD) is only the third woman to receive the prize in physics, joining Marie Curie (1903) and Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963). She is the first woman laureate in Rochester’s history.