Annie Dodge Wauneka was part of the Navajo Nation tribe, which now covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. She played an instrumental role in helping her tribe understand public health measures and worked to help eradicate Tuberculous while she served as the first woman on the Tribal Council in 1951. She also translated English medical terms into Navajo so that her tribe could better understand them and not fear modern medicine, like vaccines.

She served on the advisory boards for the U.S Surgeon General and the United States Public Health Service and was the first Native American to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.

Dr. Alice Hamilton spent the majority of her life studying toxicology and how certain metals and chemicals could affect a person’s health in the workplace, also known as industrial toxicology. She pushed for safer working conditions by sharing the dangers of working with certain toxins, primarily lead, and served as the only woman of the League of Nations Health Committee from 1924 to 1930.

Her work in the field of public health was later commemorated on a U.S postal stamp in 1995 as she is considered a pioneer of industrial toxicology.

Ann Szarewski, M.D. was one of the first researchers to determine a link between the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and cervical cancer, showing that HPV could cause cervical cancer. At the time, cervical cancer was one of the leading causes of cancer deaths in women.

In a paper she and her colleagues published in 1995, Szarewski showed that the HPV virus could cause precancerous cells and that it should be looked for when examining a pap smear sample, as it was previously not. Her research also spurred the development of the first HPV vaccine in 2006, Gardasil, which she played a role in the development of.

If the last name "Hinton" sounds familiar to you, it's probably because her dad, William Hinton, was featured in our Black History Month blog! Jane worked in her father's lab after college and was an assistant to John Howard Mueller in the bacteriology and immunology department at Harvard University.

It was there that both Mueller and Hinton discovered the Mueller-Hinton Agar, a petri dish culture where bacteria could thrive. They used this culture to determine the effectiveness of antibiotics when placed in the petri dish or "agar.” This method is primally used today to test on nonfastidious bacteria, like strep and staph.