Women Killin’ it in STEM Fields

Sept. 20, 2018

by Natalie Colarossi

Though women make up 45.8 percent of the U.S. workforce, there are still significant gender gaps within the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

But that doesn’t mean women aren’t making some of the most incredible scientific discoveries to date.

In fact, the number of women entering STEM careers is growing worldwide, and the women who are already engaged in such work contribute groundbreaking developments to the scientific community each day.

To show you just how important women are in STEM fields, in this article, we highlight 10 women around the world who are killin’ it in their careers.

Alison Gray

Assistant Professor of Oceanography, University of Washington

As an oceanographer, Alison Gray(Link is external) studies the circulation of the ocean and its impact on the physics and chemistry of the climate system. To investigate the dynamics of the ocean circulation on a variety of scales, Gray uses different resources, including profiling floats, gliders, satellites and ships.

In one of her most recent studies, Gray, alongside a team of researchers from the University of Washington, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Princeton University and several other oceanographic institutions, collected data from diving robots in the Southern Ocean, and found that Antarctic winter seas release significantly more carbon dioxide(Link is external) than previously thought.

“The Southern Ocean is a vast, stormy, cold, and distant place, which makes it extremely hard to make enough observations from a ship there,” said Gray.

“Previously our best estimates of the oceanic carbon uptake were based on observations collected by ships, but in the Southern Ocean in particular, we don’t have many ship-based observations for a large part of the year (fall and winter).”

Now, with autonomous instruments developed by the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) that dive and drift through the ocean, researchers can collect data from all over the Southern Ocean during all seasons.

“The SOCCOM floats, by collecting data year-round and in many different parts of the Southern Ocean, have shown that in winter, the region just north of the waters covered by sea ice emits a significant amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,” said Gray.

“This indicates that as a whole, the Southern Ocean is not absorbing nearly as much carbon dioxide as we previously thought.”

The new information gives researchers the ability to further analyze the Southern Ocean’s activity and predict future climate trends.