#qsotm

Our Queer Scientist of the Month for August 2016 is Bruce Voeller, a biologist and gay rights activist. 

Voeller came out at the age of 29, and became the President of  the New York Gay Activists Alliance and founding director of the National Gay Task Force, which is now known as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The (then) National Gay Task Force achieved the first ever discussion of Lesbian and Gay rights within the White House.

Voeller focused mainly on research into AIDS. He coined the name AIDS, standing for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, to replace the widely used but highly inaccurate name, GRIDD, Gay Related Immune Defence Disorder.

Our July 2016 Queer Scientist of the Month is Audrey Tang, a free software designer from Taiwan. Tang dropped out of high school and began working in several software companies by the age of 19. She first began learning Perl aged 12 and is best known for her work with Pugs, an interpreter for the Perl 6 programming language. 

She has contributed to many Free Software Programmes and has been described as “one of the greats of Taiwanese computing”.  

Tang came out as transgender in 2006.

Our April 2016 Queer Scientist of the Month is Mary Ann Horton!

Horton is a transgender computer scientist and software developer, as well as a trans educator and activist. She has worked at Bell Labs in Columbus, Ohio, which was founded by Alexander Graham Bell. While in Columbus she founded the Crystal Club, the first trans support group in the city.

Horton has had a huge involvement in gaining trans rights in the workplace. Thanks to Horton, the company Lucent became the first company to add trans-inclusive language to its Equal Opportunity policy. Her later work lead to other companies, including Apple and Xerox, adding similar language to policies in order to protect trans workers from discrimination. She has also campaigned for the coverage of trans health services by employers. 

In her activism Horton has criticised the idea that trans people have to ‘pass’ as their gender in order to be considered valid. She argues that “sometimes it’s important to be visible as a transgendered person, so that society realises we do exist”.

In 2001, she was awarded the Trailblazer “Outie” Award from Out & Equal Workplace Advocates.

Horton currently works as a Senior Programmer for Sempra Energy, where she has been since 2007.

Our March 2016 Queer Scientist of the Month is nuclear physicist Angela Clayton!

Clayton, whose interest in criticality, safety and health physics saw her working to improve the safety of nuclear reactions, was also an active trade unionist and trans rights advocate.

Her work in LGBT campaigning included close involvement in the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which allows trans people to legally change their gender marker and acquire a new birth certificate. Clayton also served as the vice-president of Press for Change, a UK campaign group who focus on legal trans rights, and as the first ‘trans observer’ to the Trades Union Congress LGBT Committee.

Our February Queer Scientist of the Month is Ben Barres, a neurobiologist and the first openly transgender scientist in the US National Academy of Sciences.

Barres’ research focuses on neurons and glial cells. Glial cells are non-neuronal cells found in the Central Nervous System that protect and myelinate neurons as well as destroying pathogens and dead neurons. He discovered that neurons did not only just “clean up” the CNS, as was previously thought, and that in reality synapses could not form without glial cells. Barres also began the questioning of why glial cells prevent axon regeneration, a large problem when dealing with damange to the central nervous system.

Happy New Year! Our January 2016 Queer Scientist of the Month is Sophie Wilson, a transgender computer scientist and 2012 recipient of the Fellow Award, issued by the Computer History Museum.

Wilson designed the Acorn System 1, an early microcomputer based on an automated cow feeder, while working for Acorn Computers Ltd. as an undergraduate student. Wilson later began working for the BBC, where she produced the programming language BBC BASIC.

Wilson also designed the ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) processor, which is found in the microchip of most smartphones and tablets. RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing and therefore the design she created produced less heat and consumed less power than previous designs as it used less components.

Our December 2015 Queer Scientist of the Month is Sally Ride, physicist and first American woman in space!

Ride joined NASA in 1978 after seeing an ad searching for space programme applicants. Previous astronauts had mostly been military pilots, but NASA was interested in finding scientists and engineers. Ride, who was completing her PhD in physics, sent in her application and was one of the 35 astronauts chosen from 8,000 applicants.

Ride flew twice on Challenger, spending over 340 hours in space. Her first flight at age 32 makes her the youngest American astronaut to have travelled to space.

After leaving NASA she went on to become a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and co-founder of Sally Ride Science. Founded in 2001, Sally Ride Science aimed to inspire young people (especially girls and minorities) to study STEM subjects in school.

Although she was never publicly out during her lifetime, her obituary identified Tam O'Shaughnessy (a fellow co-founder of Sally Ride Science) as her partner of 27 years. Despite choosing to not come out during her time at NASA (during the 70s and 80s) she is thought to be the first LGBT+ astronaut.