The winners of the 2024 STEM Essay Contest sponsored by the McLean Area Branch have been announced. The contest was open to 7th and 8th grade students (girls and boys) at local public and private schools . They were asked to discover and publicize women including women of color (non-white) who made a difference in STEM fields, but who received little or no recognition for their contributions while they were alive. Strong preference was given to essays about women who are not well known even today. Each essay described one woman’s STEM contribution and its impact, as well as why the student selected the woman.

Winners of the 2024 STEM Essay Contest are pictured with members of the branch’s steering committee for the contest. From left to right: Aidan Jamerson, Yanling Lin, Joshua Zeng, Hamin Park, Myrtle Hendricks-Corrales, Natalie Powell, Beth Cooper, and Judy Page.

This year’s winners are :

• 1st Place: Joshua Zeng, Longfellow Middle School (7th Grade)
• Honorable Mention: Aidan Jamerson, Longfellow Middle School (7th Grade)
• Honorable Mention: Yangling Lin, Longfellow Middle School (8th Grade)
• Honorable Mention: Hamin Park, Longfellow Middle School (7th Grade)
• Honorable Mention: Natalie Powell, Poe Middle School (7th Grade)

As part of the awards ceremony, the 1^st place winner, Joshua Zeng, read his essay on Katsuko Saruhasi. She was a Japanese geochemist and environmental scientist who conducted a landmark study that provided the first evidence of radioactive fallout in seawater from nuclear weapons testing.

Fourteen volunteers from our branch served as judges: Pam Bacher, Beth Cooper, Christina Hamilton, Myrtle Hendricks-Corrales, Reed Isbell, Deborah Leiderman, Nina McVeigh, Tom McVeigh, Ruth Nowjack-Raymer, Judy Page, Diana Parsell, Phyllis Provenzano, Carolyn Wyatt, and Phyllis Yoshida. The essay contest was managed by a steering committee, consisting of Beth Cooper, Myrtle Hendricks-Corrales, and Hamideh Soltani-Ahmadi together with Judy Page, STEM Chair.

For this year’s STEM Essay Contest, the students chose a group of accomplished women in STEM fields who are hardly known today. Here is a sample of some of the other women about whom the students wrote essays:

• Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer born in 1868 who did research on a type of variable star called Cepheids. Through the analysis of different Cepheid variables, their periods, and their luminosity, she discovered that stars with longer periods had greater intrinsic brightness, compared to stars with shorter periods. This is known as Leavitt’s Law.
• Dr. Nettie Stevens became interested in biology and zoology and studied at both Stanford University and Bryn Mawr College. As a researcher at Bryn Mawr, Nettie began to study morphology, which is the study of organisms, especially with regard to gender determination. While experimenting with mealworms, Nettie found that gender was indeed not influenced by the environment, but by parents. She also created a way to determine gender before birth.
• Edith Clarke was an engineer born in 1883 who studied astronomy and mathematics and then went to work for AT&T as a “computer.” In 1921 she filed a patent for her graphical calculator and in 1925 it was approved.
  
• Dr. Marjorie Lee Browne was a pioneer in mathematics and education.  She was the third African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her contribution to the field of topology, developing curricula and lecture notes for teachers, and teaching math in schools and colleges hugely impacted her chosen area of study.