MacArthur Fellows on Women in Science Day

Every year we award MacArthur Fellowships of $625,000 to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals. The no-strings-attached Fellowships encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional endeavors.

Many MacArthur Fellows are women in science, so we dug up these quotes from just a few remarkable scientists who are developing scientific breakthroughs, creating new frameworks for understanding our society, and helping to make the world a better place.

Which ones inspire you?

“One of the joys of studying the brain is that I get to actually peek inside the carpenter shop and see each step that the brain is using to construct our perception of reality.”–Doris Tsao, Neuroscientist

Health equity “is when everyone has fair opportunities to achieve optimal health, and no one is prevented from doing that based on socially determined circumstances.”–Lisa Cooper, Public Health Physician

“There are many open questions and my dream is to shed some light to understand a little more about the mysteries of the universe.”–Ana Maria Rey, Atomic Physicist

“Biases can actually influence something as basic as what you see. But they can also influence how you treat people. They can also influence whether teachers are going to discipline a child in school. It can influence whether you get hired, whether you get promoted. It can influence jurors in making death penalty decisions. All kinds of things in life. It can do so in ways that sometimes are beneath your awareness and sometimes can lead to great harm.”–Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Social Psychologist

“The thing we’re really focusing on right now is figuring out the rate of sea level rise. What people really want to know is how quickly this is going to happen.”–Andrea Dutton, Geochemist and Paleoclimatologist

“You have to think about the nervous system from a systems perspective. I was always sort of a reductionist, and doing things this way has taken me out of my comfort zone.”–Vanessa Ruta, Neuroscientist

“As we talk about data as the new oil, it’s particularly important to develop technologies that can utilize data in a privacy-preserving way.”–Dawn Song, Computer Security Specialist

“I think we can democratize how we prevent and treat cancer, so people on the periphery can take advantage of the research going on in the center. With health information tools, we can actually do that.”–Olufunmilayo Olopade, Oncologist

“What we’re stumbling on is the importance of looking after your place for the continuance of cultural practices and for well-being, what indigenous people have been doing for thousands of years. Looking after ecosystems is part of many indigenous cultures, and they understand how that’s important for mental and spiritual health.”–Stacy Jupiter, Marine Scientist

“When I started graduate school…LIGO [the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] was about to be built and [I was told] I could probably get data from the first instruments that were built. That data did not come until 20 years later. But I didn’t feel impatient or discouraged because there were so many discoveries along the way. We were constantly innovating.”–Nergis Mavalvala, Quantum Astrophysicist

“The work we’re contributing to helps clarify a lot about how social interactions could be causal to the outcomes we care about.”–Jenny Tung, Evolutionary Anthropologist and Geneticist

“We can’t look at health in isolation. It’s not just in the doctor’s office. It’s got to be where we live, we work, we play, we pray. If you have a healthy community, you have a healthy individual.”–Regina Benjamin, Rural Family Physician