Meet the Women in STEM 2026 List

Co-founder and CEO, Caribou Biosciences

Rachel Haurwitz, PhD

Rachel is a co-founder of Caribou Biosciences (alongside Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna) and has been its president and chief executive officer and a director since the company's inception in 2011. In 2018, the Association for Women in Science recognized Rachel with the annual Next Generation Award. She serves on the board of directors for Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO). Rachel earned an AB in biological sciences from Harvard College and a PhD in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Co-founder and former CEO, Intra-Cellular Therapies

Sharon Mates, PhD

Sharon Mates served as the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-founder of Intra-Cellular Therapies Inc. (ITI) from June 2002 until its acquisition by Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) for $14.6 billion in 2025. Intra-Cellular Therapies focused on developing medicines for mental health disorders like bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia and received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for its novel antipsychotic CAPLYTA® in 2019. She has served on several not-for-profit boards and is also a director of Medincell, a biopharmaceutical company in France (Euronext: MEDCL) and NASDAQ listed Benitec (BNTC). Dr. Mates received a B.S. from Ohio State University, a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and completed her postdoctoral fellowships at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Scientist, entrepreneur, and biotech CEO

Shoshana Shendelman, PhD

Shoshana Shendelman is a scientist and entrepreneur, founder of several biotech companies, and a pioneer in developing drugs for rare and underserved diseases. She currently holds leadership roles in several private biotech companies and serves as CEO of Cyana Therapeutics, an oncology company developing drugs to treat solid tumors.

Previously, Shoshana founded and led a pharmaceutical company through IPO and advanced drugs through phase 3 development for rare disease indications and heart failure.

Shoshana completed a BA in biochemistry at Brandeis University and received a PhD from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons Integrated Program in Cellular, Molecular and Biophysical Studies.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist

Anne L'Huillier, PhD

Anne L'Huillier is a French/Swedish physicist working on the interaction between short and intense laser fields and atoms. She won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics alongside Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz for her experiments producing pulses of light so short that they are measured in attoseconds, thus demonstrating that these pulses can be used to provide images of processes inside atoms and molecules. Anne obtained her PhD from Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris and the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) and is a professor at Lund University, Sweden.

A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Chemistry

Michelle C. Chang, PhD

Michelle Chang is an outstanding scientist in the field of organic chemistry and a named professor at Princeton University (A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Chemistry). She has made seminal contributions across broad areas of biosynthesis and biocatalysts, where she has developed synthetic methods to advance the preparation of halogenated natural products of medical importance and biomass conversion for energy and environmental science. Her findings are being applied broadly from the development of biofuels to pharmaceuticals. Dr. Chang studied chemistry/biochemistry and French literature as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego and completed her PhD in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor and founder of Stanford eWEAR

Zhenan Bao, PhD

Zhenan Bao is the K. K. Lee Professor, Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, of Chemistry, and of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Bao founded the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR) and is the current faculty director. At Stanford, Bao has pioneered molecular design concepts and fabrication processes to advance the scope and applications of skin-inspired electronics. Her group discovered nano confinement effect of conjugated polymers in polymer blends, which established the fundamental foundation for skin-inspired electronic materials and devices. Her work has resulted in new materials and device solutions for soft robotics, wearable and implantable electronics for precision health, precision mental health and advanced tools for understanding neuroscience and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. She received her Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from The University of Chicago in 1995.

Engineer and NASA astronaut

Christina Koch

Christina Koch is an engineer and NASA astronaut. She served as mission specialist of NASA's Artemis II mission and served on the International Space Station for almost all of 2019 in Expeditions 59, 60, and 61. Christina spent a total of 328 consecutive days in space and participated in the first all-female spacewalks. She also served as Branch Chief of the Assigned Crew Branch in the Astronaut Office and did a rotation as Assistant for Technical Integration for the Center Director at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Koch earned her Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and physics and a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University.

Astrophysicist studying dark matter signatures

Kerstin Perez, PhD

Kerstin Perez is an astrophysicist studying dark matter interactions using cosmic particles. Her work focuses on unexplored cosmic signatures, with impact at the intersection of particle physics, astrophysics, and advanced instrumental techniques. Perez is the Lavine Family Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences in the Department of Physics at Columbia University. She has won numerous awards, including a Sloan Research Fellowship, Cottrell Scholar Award, APS DPF Early Career Instrumentation Award, and MIT School of Science Teaching Prize for Undergraduate Education. She earned her B.A. in physics from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from Caltech.

Geneticist and Huntington's disease researcher

Nancy Wexler, PhD

Nancy Wexler is an American geneticist and is the Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, as well as the President of the Hereditary Disease Foundation. She is best known for her involvement in the discovery of the location of the gene that causes Huntington's Disease. Wexler's mother, grandfather and several uncles died of Huntington's Disease, so the disease was close to her heart and held meaning beyond scientific interest. She led a research team into a remote part of Venezuela where the disease is prevalent and obtained DNA samples from a large family with a majority of the members having Huntington's disease. The samples her team collected were instrumental in allowing a global collaborative research group to locate the gene that causes the disease. Wexler participated in the successful effort to create a chromosomal test to identify carriers of Huntington's disease.

Wexler currently holds or has held numerous public policy positions, including Chair of the Joint NIH/DOE Ethical, Legal and Social Issues Working Group of the National Center for Human Genome Research, Chair of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) and Member of the Institute of Medicine. Wexler has served as a member of the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and on the Advisory Committee on Research on Women's Health, NIH. She received the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science and the 1993 Albert Lasker Public Service Award. She is a Council Member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. She is also a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Fellow at the Royal College of Physicians; a Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section on Neuroscience; a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts; and Councilor, Society for Neuroscience.