page_title: Timeline of women in science
section_title: 1960s
hierarchical_section_title: Timeline of women in science / Late 20th century / 1960s
caption_attribution_description: Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Heather Higginbottom poses for a photo with renowned primatologist and conservationist, Dr. Jane Goodall, and Elizabeth Jordan, Director of the State Department’s Office of Global Health Diplomacy, before Dr. Goodall discussed the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI)’s work promoting health, gender equality, and conservation at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on October 27, 2015. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
context_page_description: This is a timeline of women in science, spanning from ancient history up to the 21st century. While the timeline primarily focuses on women involved with natural sciences such as astronomy, biology, chemistry and physics, it also includes women from the social sciences and the formal sciences, as well as notable science educators and medical scientists. The chronological events listed in the timeline relate to both scientific achievements and gender equality within the sciences.
context_section_description: 1960: British primatologist Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in Tanzania; her study of them continued for over 50 years. Her observations challenged previous ideas that only humans made tools and that chimpanzees had a basically vegetarian diet.
  1960: American medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones" along with Roger Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally who received it "for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain".
  Early 1960s: German-Canadian metallurgist Ursula Franklin studied levels of radioactive isotope strontium-90 that were appearing in the teeth of children as a side effect of nuclear weapons testing fallout. Her research influenced the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
  1960s: American mathematician Katherine Johnson calculated flight paths at NASA for manned space flights.
  1961: Indian chemist Asima Chatterjee became the first female recipient of a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize. She was recognized in the Chemical Sciences category for her contributions to phytomedicine.
  1962: South African botanist Margaret Levyns became the first woman president of the Royal Society of South Africa.
  1962: French physicist Marguerite Perey became the first female Fellow elected to the Académie des Sciences.
  1963: Elsa G. Vilmundardóttir became the first female Icelandic geologist, completing her studies at Stockholm University.
  1963: Maria Goeppert Mayer became the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics; she shared the prize with J. Hans D. Jensen "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure" and Eugene Paul Wigner "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".
  1964: American mathematician Irene Stegun completed the work which led to the publication of Handbook of Mathematical Functions, a widely used and widely cited reference work in applied mathematics.
  1964: British chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances".
  1964: Scottish virologist June Almeida made the first identification of a human coronavirus.
  1965: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to receive a Ph.D. in computer science. Her thesis was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns".
  1966: Japanese immunologist Teruko Ishizaka, working with Kimishige Ishizaka, discovered the antibody class Immunoglobulin E (IgE).
  1967: British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell co-discovered the first radio pulsars.
  1967: Sue Arnold became the first female British Geological Survey person to go to sea on a research vessel.
  1967: South African radiobiologist Tikvah Alper discovered that scrapie, an infectious brain disease affecting sheep, did not spread via DNA or RNA like a viral or bacterial disease. The discovery enabled scientists to better understand diseases caused by prions.
  1967: Yvonne Brill, a Canadian-American rocket and jet propulsion engineer, invented the hydrazine resistojet propulsion system.
  1969: Beris Cox became the first female paleontologist in the British Geological Survey.
  1969: Ukrainian-born astronomer Svetlana Gerasimenko co-discovered the 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet.
caption: British primatologist Jane Goodall
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