ISSUE
23 April 2022
WIE - UC NEWSLETTER IEEE Student Branch of the UC Women in Engineering Affinity Group
WHAT'S WHAT'S INSIDE: INSIDE: Biography of Katherine Johnson - P. 1
Achievement of Ishani Malhotra - P.2
Curiosity - P.3
Recipes with WiE P.3
ISSUE NO. 23 | APRIL 2022
Biography KATHERINE JOHNSON Born August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Katherine Coleman was one of the first African American women to work at NASA as a scientist. Katherine passed February 24, 2020, at 101 years old, in Newport News, Virginia. During her more than three decades with the U.S. Space Program, the American mathematician calculated and analyzed the route of many spacecraft, including the one that allowed the first Americans to enter Earth’s orbit and set foot on the moon. By the time Coleman was 10, she had already started attending high school. In 1937, aged 18, Katherine graduated from West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University) with the highest honors, earning her bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and French. In 1939, Coleman was handpicked to be one of the first three African American students to enroll in a graduate program at West Virginia University. Once there she studied math but soon left after marrying James Goble, yearning to start a family. However, he died in 1956 and three years later Katherine married James Johnson. In 1953 she began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)’s West Area Computing unit with a group of African American women known as the West Computers. They manually performed complex mathematical calculations for the program’s engineers, analyzed test data and provided mathematical computations that were essential to the success of the early U.S. space program. Unfortunately, up until 1958, time when NACA was incorporated into the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), NACA was segregated and were obliged to use different bathrooms and dining facilities. At NASA, gçlkçrrgrhrth
SOURCE: NASA.GOV
Johnson was a member of the Space Task Group. In 1960, Katherine Johnson, along with one of the group’s engineers, coauthored a paper on calculations for placing a spacecraft into orbit. This had been the first time a woman in her division received credit as an author of a research report. Posteriorly, Johnson would author or coauthor more than 20 other scientific papers over her career. Johnson also played an important role in NASA’s Mercury Program of crewed spaceflights from 1961 to 1963. In 1961, she calculated the path for Freedom 7, the spacecraft that put the first U.S. astronaut in space, Alan B. Shepard. The following year, Katherine was specifically requested by John Glenn to verify the calculations programmed into the electronic computer for the Friendship 7 flight, thus allowing him to be the first U.S. astronaut to orbit vdggrgrthrt
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the Earth. Johnson was part of the team on dklklçkgtrhrthtr the calculations on the Apollo 11 mission of 1969, which accomplished to send the first three men to the Moon. She later worked on the space shuttle program pending her retirement from NASA in 1986. Adding to the list of great achievements, in 2015 President Barack Obama awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, and the lfkkl
ensuing year NASA named a building, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, after her. Margot Lee Shetterly even published a book about the West Computers, including Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson: Hidden Figures, being released a namesake movie in 2016. Nonetheless, Johnson’s memoir, My Remarkable Journey, was published posthumously, in 2021.
Mariana Almeida
Achievement ISHANI MALHOTRA
This month we wish to congratulate Ishani Malhotra, the winner of the Science and MedTech category of the AccelerateHER awards. This event seeks to empower and accelerate the growth, visibility and backing of talented female business founders and leaders by offering the winner of each category an investor-ready mentoring package from Investing Women Angels. Beyond this, all winners become part of the AccelerateHER network, therefore benefitting from industry contacts, potential funders and learning. Malhotra is the founder and chief executive of Carcinotech Ltd, a company which manufactures 3D printed, micro-sized cancer models developed from patient-specific cancer stem cells. These models can mimic the cancer environment, providing an ample array of uses from drug testing, to personalized medicine testing. Beyond this, the microfluidic technology used in this product, SOURCE: HERALDSCOTLAND.COM invented by Malhotra herself, makes it innovative, frgregr time saving and cost effective. With Carcinotech, Malhotra hopes to aid in the development of cancer drugs, as well as provide a good insight into cancer relapses and mechanisms, and reduce animal testing.
Sarah Holm PAGE 2
ISSUE NO. 23 | APRIL 2022
Curiosity of the month... Have you ever wondered where the expression “bug” comes from when applied to computer failures? Well, look no further because I’m about to tell you all about it! It was 1946 and Grace Hopper, an American computer scientist and rear admiral in the United States Navy, finished writing her first computer manual – A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. A manual that described how to program a computer (Mark I) and became the first extensive treatment of how to program a computer. While working on the said computer (Mark I), Hopper and her team found a real moth on a piece of tape on the machine’s logbook. The moth created holes in the computer’s punched paper njklk causing problems in the calculator’s functions. tapes,
SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA.COM
After that, her team continued to use the term “computer bug” to refer to problems that complicated the input of data in Mark I and Mark II. That was then, and now, everyone throughout the world uses or knows the meaning of the term “computer bug”.
Sofia Diogo
Recipes with WiE: BOLO DE FORMIGA This is the cake that me and my family eat when celebrating something together. So, if you are feeling that sugar craving, this is what you need.
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INGREDIENTS 6 eggs 1 + 1/3 cups of sugar 2 cups of flour 1 cup of oil 1 cream packet 150g of grated coconut 1 teaspoon of baking powder Chocolate sprinkles
INSTRUCTIONS 1. Mix the yolks with the sugar and add the cream packet and the oil. 2. After beating the egg whites, add them to the mix. Then, add the baking powder, the flour and the coconut. 3. Finish by adding the chocolate sprinkles. 4. Bake at high heat until golden brown. 5. Enjoy!
Sofia Diogo
F O L L O W
M E D I A
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T O
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S T A Y
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S O C I A L
T U N E D
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P O S T S !
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DOWN
ACROSS
1. Maiden name of the woman featured in this month's biography
5. Company which Ishani Malhotra founded
2. Name of last month's recipe
6. Date of April Fool's day
3. Holiday involving bunnies and eggs 4. One of the ingredients for this month's recipe
SOLUTIONS 1. COLEMAN 2. SYRNIKI 3. EASTER 4. COCONUT 5. CARCINOTECH 6. FIRST PAGE 5
Happy Easter See You Next Month!
ISSUE NO. 23 | APRIL 2022