By: Nour Hany
Women's role is finally taken seriously in all fields; this is especially highlighted by women awarded the Nobel Prizes 2020. From chemistry to physics, and literature, let us pay tribute to some great female figures and their achievements.
The Nobel Prize for Physics 2020 went to Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy”. In chemistry, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna won the Nobel Prize “for the development of a method for genome editing”. Finally, Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
Andrea Ghez
Andrea Ghez is an astronomer who created a new path for galactic observation, changing some previous limitations of ground-based instruments. The astronomer was born on 16 June 1965 in New York; she acquired her BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1987. In 1989, she received her MS, and in 1992, she attained her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.
Emmanuelle Charpentier
Emmanuelle Charpentier is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry; she was born on 11 December 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge. Her discovery took place in 2012 when she co-discovered CRISPR, a gene-editing method now widely used to edit DNA sequences. Charpentier taught at Humboldt University, Hannover Medical School, and the University of Vienna; she is now establishing her own research unit at the esteemed Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany, as the discovery has raised around $2.5 billion and has offices in Switzerland, the US and the UK. Charpentier won the prize with Jennifer A. Doudna as they discovered the genome editing method together.
Louise Glück
An amazing poet and essayist who was born in New York on 22 April 1943, she grew up on Long Island, wrote many books and essays, and received a great number of awards. “Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither ‘confessional’ nor ‘intellectual’ in the usual senses of those words”, wrote the critic Helen Vendler.
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