Gillespie graduated from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1949. After several years working for Curtis Publications, she returned to her alma mater, where she would serve in various alumni relations roles for nearly 40 years.
In 1971, Schmertz co-founded the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Later in life, she became the first woman to serve as a senior vice president at American Express.
Dr. Kane was a curator with Yale University's Garvan and Related Collections of American Art for nearly six decades. She was a scholar of American decorative arts who specialized in early American furniture, seventeenth-century silver, and contemporary craft.
Dr. Dinnerstein joined the University of Arizona in 1975 as founding director of the women's studies program. Four years later, she became founding director of the Southwest Institute for Research on Women.
Dr. Chilton was a pioneer in the field of plant biotechnology. While on the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, she and a team of colleagues created the first genetically modified plants while studying how to remove harmful bacterium from the DNA of trees.
Dr. Newkirk was the first faculty member of color in the College of Home Economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where served as chair of the department of home economics education for 20 years. Dr. Newkirk was also the first African American elected president of the American Home Economics Association.
Dr. McKinney recently retired earlier this year as a professor emerita of music at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She served as founding director of the university's graduate and undergraduate programs in music therapy.
Dr. Benningfield taught in Virginia Tech's doctoral program in marriage and family therapy for nearly a decade. She was a leader in the broader field of counseling and was twice elected president of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.
At the time of her passing, Dr. Okoro was in her eleventh year of teaching at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte School of Nursing. Her scholarship centered on chronic illness management and caregiver support.
Dr. Logan was in her 13th year of teaching as a professor of sociology at Hastings College in Nebraska at the time of her passing. She had a wide range of scholarly interests, including social justice, criminology, and women's and gender studies.
In 1965, Dr. Huang became the first woman hired to a tenure-track professorship in the physical sciences at Johns Hopkins University. An expert in genetics, she authored more than 300 papers, held 16 patents, and mentored more than 100 students and postdocs throughout her lifetime.
