‎ ‎ View the list: A-FMaya Ajmera59 | President & CEO, Society for ScienceAs a teenager, Maya Ajmera was a finalist in the Science Talent Search. Today, she leads the nonprofit behind the prestigious competition and several of the world's largest pre-college STEM programs. Since becoming president and CEO of Society for Science in 2014, she secured a $100 million, 10-year sponsorship for the Science Talent Search, launched an $11 million STEM outreach initiative to expand opportunities for underserved students and helped grow Science News into a media enterprise reaching more than 23 million readers. Lauren Antonoff56 | CEO, Life360 Lauren Antonoff dropped out of college, eventually going back to complete her undergrad degree at age 52. But that didn’t stop her from a distinguished career in tech: nearly two decades at Microsoft, president of GoDaddy’s U.S. small business unit, and now, the CEO of publicly-traded Life 360, which sells devices and apps to keep track of the whereabouts of everything from kids to keys and electronics. Since Antonoff took over in August 2025, she’s doubled the San Francisco-based company’s revenue, grown its user base to 100 million people (monthly) and booked its first profit. It now trades at a $6 billion market cap. Katrina Armstrong60 | Director, Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical ResearchOver a career that has included 17 years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, eight years as the physician-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital (where she was the first woman appointed to the role) and Columbia University, Katrina Armstrong’s work has focused on clinical epidemiology, medical decision-making and health equity. In June 2026, Armstrong was appointed to launch the Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical Research at Columbia, where she will lead efforts to advance scientific discovery and develop the next generation of the biomedical workforce. Zhenan Bao55 | Founder, Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR)With some 800 peer-reviewed publications and more than 80 U.S. patents to her name, Zhenan Bao is a global authority on chemistry and material science. Bao joined Stanford’s chemical engineering department in 2004 and has established a lab that has advanced understanding about polymers and skin-inspired electronic materials and devices. Her work has applications for precision mental health, neurodegenerative diseases and simultaneous monitoring of brain and gut health. Bao is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. Wendy Barnes54 | CEO & president, GoodRxWendy Barnes became president and CEO of GoodRx in January 2025. The Santa Monica, California-based prescription savings company allows consumers to compare prices, get coupons, and, it claims, potentially save as much as 80% on their medications. GoodRx, which is used by nearly 25 million consumers annually, recorded just under $800 million in revenue last year and posted net income of $30 million. Before joining GoodRx (market cap: $1 billion), Barnes, who has a bachelor’s in biochemistry from the U.S. Air Force Academy and an MBA from the University of Alaska Anchorage, had been CEO of pharmacy benefits provider RxBenefits, president of Express Scripts Pharmacy and a group vice president at Rite Aid. Charlie Blackwell-Thompson60 | Launch Director, NASACharlie Blackwell-Thompson has shaped NASA history with her career. In 2016, when she was appointed to her position, Blackwell-Thompson became the first woman to serve as flight director for the space agency. She’s in charge of the planning and management of all Artemis Launch Countdown operations—which means that in April 2026, her voice was the one that sent the crew of Artemis II into a space flight that would break the distance record for human space travel. “On this historic mission, you take with you… the hopes and dreams of a new generation,” she told the astronauts moments before liftoff. Karen Blanks Ellis60 | Chief Sustainability Officer, FedExAfter nearly two decades leading environmental initiatives across FedEx, one of the world's largest transportation networks, chemical engineer Karen Blanks Ellis became the company's chief sustainability officer in 2024. She now oversees efforts to achieve carbon-neutral operations by 2040. Since the company set that goal, absolute emissions from FedEx-controlled operations have declined by more than 15%, even as package volume has more than doubled. In 2025, FedEx executed sustainable aviation fuel agreements covering more than 16.5 million gallons of lower-emissions blended jet fuel and expanded its electric vehicle fleet to six continents. Marsha Anderson Bomar74 | President, American Society of Civil EngineersMarsha Anderson Bomar became president of the American Society of Civil Engineers in October 2025, leading that profession’s largest U.S. membership organization during a time of massive infrastructure spending and preparations for a changing climate. The Atlanta-based transportation engineer previously held senior planning roles for the city of Atlanta and MARTA, its regional transit agency. Bomar had been a member of ASCE since 1984, prior to becoming its leader, and has spent more than four decades working in transit, traffic engineering and public infrastructure roles. Her mandate is to give civil engineers a louder voice advocating for safer, more sustainable infrastructure improvements. Christine Brown59 | Heritage Provider Network Professor in Immunotherapy, City of HopeChristine Brown is helping bring CAR T-cell therapy—one of cancer medicine's biggest breakthroughs—to patients with glioblastoma. The aggressive brain cancer has a five-year survival rate of less than 10%. Her early clinical trials helped demonstrate that CAR T cells could be safely delivered to the brain, and one patient has remained in complete remission for six years. Building on those results, Brown launched a 2026 clinical trial of a gene-edited CAR T-cell therapy designed to make the treatment more effective. She now leads four ongoing clinical trials for glioblastoma. Mary Brunkow65 | Distinguished Investigator & 2025 Nobel Laureate, Institute for Systems BiologyMary Brunkow, a distinguished investigator at Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology, shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for discoveries related to T cells, the immune system’s safeguard to prevent the body from attacking itself. In 2001, Brunkow and Ramsdell identified the Foxp3 gene as the cause of a mutant strain of mice known as “scurfy mice,” a discovery that has important implications for understanding autoimmune diseases and developing drugs to treat them. Jennifer Tour Chayes 69 | Dean, College of Computing, Data Science and Society, UC BerkeleyJennifer Tour Chayes has spent her career building institutions at the forefront of artificial intelligence. After co-founding three Microsoft Research labs over more than two decades, she joined UC Berkeley in 2020 to establish the College of Computing, Data Science and Society—the university's first new college in more than 50 years. A mathematician and computer scientist, Chayes has authored more than 150 scientific papers, co-invented 30 patents and now leads research applying AI to challenges ranging from cancer immunotherapy to developing materials for carbon capture. Karen S. Carter55 | CEO, Dow Karen Carter became CEO of Dow in July 2026, making history as the first woman to lead the $40 billion-revenue materials science giant since its founding in 1897. She began her career at the company as an intern in 1994 and rose through a wide range of roles spanning sales and marketing, international business operations in Asia-Pacific, human resources, packaging and specialty plastics (a $23 billion segment). Before becoming CEO, Carter served as the company’s chief operating officer. Margaret Dawson62 | Chief Marketing Officer & Open Source Advocate, SUSEOpen-source technology platform SUSE recruited veteran technology executive Margaret Dawson in 2025 to serve as its chief marketing officer and open-source advocate. Since joining the 33-year-old firm, which makes operating system Linux and a bevy of other cloud and AI products, Dawson has spearheaded SUSE’s Sovereign AI strategy to better position its standing as an alternative to some of the bigger tech firms. “There is a huge movement among many governments to understand, use, and collaborate more with open source and open communities,” Dawson recently wrote. Earlier in her career, Dawson worked at RedHat, Microsoft and Apptio (an IBM company). Cindy Eckert53 | Founder & CEO, Sprout PharmaceuticalsCindy Eckert is challenging the way women's sexual health is treated. In December 2025, Cindy Eckert received a landmark FDA clearance for her company’s keystone product: Addyi, “the little pink pill,” was approved to treat Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) in post-menopausal women, making it the only FDA-approved treatment for HSDD in pre- or post-menopausal women. After founding the company in 2011, she sold it to Valeant in 2015. Two years later, she bought it back and reclaimed the CEO title.Karen Eng56 | President & CEO, CSMIAfter building and selling her optometry practice, Karen Eng made a career pivot in 2000 to lead her family's engineering consulting firm, CSMI. Today, the company helps manufacturers including PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Nestlé and Tyson Foods design, improve and install production and packaging systems worldwide. Under Eng's leadership, CSMI has expanded internationally while remaining a certified woman- and Asian American-owned business. She is also a leading advocate for women- and minority-owned businesses, mentoring entrepreneurs and serving in leadership roles with national Asian American business organizations. BNSF50 OVER 50 HIGHLIGHTKatie Farmer56 | President & CEO, BNSF RailwayKatie Farmer became the first woman to lead a major U.S. freight railroad when she became president and CEO of BNSF in 2021. The Berkshire Hathaway-backed company operates a 32,500-mile network that’s vital for shipping consumer goods, agricultural and energy products and industrial freight across the U.S. and into three Canadian provinces. Farmer joined a BNSF predecessor company 34 years ago and led the railroad’s operations before becoming CEO. With rising demand for shipping, the company expects annual revenue to rise a bit less than 10% this year, from $23.4 billion in 2025. Nicola Fox57 | Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, NASA Don’t be fooled by the “associate” of Nicola Fox’s title; she is, effectively, the head of science at NASA. She oversees roughly 100 space missions annually, all aimed at helping scientists better understand the universe. Fox joined NASA in 2018 to lead its heliophysics division, and she has called the Parker Solar Probe—which launched that same year and was designed to study the sun’s outermost layer, or corona—the most important mission of her career. “Sending a spacecraft right into the Sun’s corona where the material is super-heated to about 3 million degrees? WOW!!” Fox has said. H-NPaula T. Hammond62 | Dean, MIT School of EngineeringPaula T. Hammond has designed polymers and nanoparticles to deliver cancer therapies more precisely, concentrating treatment at diseased tissue while limiting damage elsewhere. She’s also applied her work to materials for use in batteries and fuel cells. In January 2026, she became the first woman to lead MIT’s School of Engineering, after previously serving as the first woman to lead its School of Chemical Engineering. Hammond was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2024, and is among a small group of scientists elected to all three U.S. National Academies—Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Lisa Harris69 | Chief Executive Officer, Eskenazi HealthEskenazi Health is the public hospital for the Indianapolis area and the sponsoring hospital for the city’s main EMS, and Lisa Harris, M.D., has served as its CEO since 2003. Over the last 10 years, she’s been laser-focused on community care, more than doubling primary care visits between 2016 and 2025 and also boosting the number of mental health visits. In 2023, Harris spearheaded a $60 million campaign to expand “health equity zones” to underserved communities and erase the 16-year mortality gap between residents in the city’s most- and least-expensive neighborhoods.Lisa Gelobter55 | Chief Technology Officer, New York CityIn February 2026, rookie New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani hired veteran computer scientist Lisa Gelobter to serve as CTO and commissioner of the Office of Technology and Innovation. In this role, Gelobter is charged with managing technology infrastructure, cybersecurity and data management that serve the city’s 8.5 million residents. Earlier in her career, Gelobter was part of the launch team for Hulu and head of digital products at BET. Most recently, Gelobter served as the founder of tEQuitable, a technology platform to help companies address workplace culture issues. Jacqueline (Jacque) Hinman64 | CEO & Director, Atlas Technical ConsultantsJacque Hinman has built a career leading engineering companies through periods of transformation. As chair and CEO of engineering and consulting firm CH2M, she orchestrated the firm's turnaround before its 2017 sale to Jacobs Engineering, nearly doubling its share price. After spending five years advising private equity firms on acquisitions and portfolio companies, Hinman became CEO of Atlas Technical Consultants in 2024. Today she leads the infrastructure and environmental services firm, which has more than 3,300 employees, over 100 offices and $650 million in annual revenue. Colette D. Honorable56 | Executive Vice President & Chief Legal Officer, ExelonAs EVP, chief legal officer and also top compliance executive at the $25 billion (revenue) Exelon, Colette D. Honorable shapes governance, policy and legal affairs at one of the largest utilities companies in the U.S. Honorable joined Exelon in 2023 after six years at law firm Reed Smith advising America’s largest corporations on clean energy strategies and climate regulations. Earlier, she served on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, overseeing issues including power system reliability and clean energy integration. Janice Bryant Howroyd73 | Founder & CEO, ActOne Group Janice Bryant Howroyd started ActOne Group in 1978 with just $1,500, including a $900 loan from her mother. Now, the Torrance, CA-based workforce solutions firm, which provides services like temporary staffing, has 17,000 clients and 2,600 employees across 33 countries. The ActOne CEO and her family own more than a dozen properties, including commercial buildings and residences. Howroyd has published two books, Acting Up (2019) and The Art of Work (2009), which share her advice on how to conquer the business world. Photoshot/Newscom50 OVER 50 HIGHLIGHTBahija Jallal65 | CEO & Board Chair, ImmunocoreSince becoming CEO of the $1.9 billion (market cap) Immunocore in 2019, Bahija Jallal has led the global biotech company that is pioneering treatment for uveal melanoma, a type of cancer that affects the eye. It was under Jallal’s leadership that the company secured its first FDA approval in 2022, for T cell receptor (TCR) therapy. Before joining Immunocore, Jallal steered the global R&D group at AstraZeneca. Trained at the Université de Paris and Max Planck Institutes, she has authored more than 70 peer-reviewed papers and holds some 15 patents. Sabrina Martucci Johnson60 | Founder & CEO, Daré BioscienceIn 2021, six years after founding the women’s-health-focused Daré Bioscience, Sabrina Martucci Johnson secured FDA approval for XACIATO, a gel-based treatment for bacterial vaginosis. Today the company is spearheading other treatments for women, including a hormone-free contraceptive, a cream for Female Sexual Arousal Disorder and a non-invasive therapy for HPV. Before founding Daré in 2015, Johnson was the president of WomenCare Global Trading, a specialty pharmaceutical company also working in the female health space. A biomedical engineer by training, Johnson started her career with Baxter Healthcare.Dina Katabi54 | Co-founder & President, Emerald InnovationsSyria-born Dina Katabi is a professor at MIT and the director of the university’s Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing, where she runs a lab focused on analyzing signals. Earlier in her career, that meant improving signal processing to make Wi-Fi and cell service more efficient; today, that means building a machine that uses wireless signals and machine learning to monitor the human body. A MacArthur “Genius grant” winner, Katabi now also serves as co-founder and president of Emerald Innovations, which is commercializing her health-monitoring tech. The fully-bootstrapped startup sells an at-home, wireless system that can track sleep and breathing patterns, heart rate and movement, all without the need for a wearable device. Julie Kim56 | CEO, TakedaJulie Kim took the CEO reins of Tokyo-based Takeda Pharmaceuticals in June 2026, becoming its first female chief executive in the company’s 245-year history. The company, best known for drugs that treat Crohn’s disease and ADHD, raked in $28.2 billion in revenue in 2025. Before she joined Takeda in 2019 through the firm’s $62 billion acquisition of the U.K.-based pharma company Shire, Kim was an executive at biopharma firms Baxter and Baxalta. She splits her time between Tokyo and Boston. Debra Laskin72 | Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Rutgers UniversityDebra Laskin has spent decades studying how the immune system responds to toxic chemicals, helping explain why the body's own defenses can sometimes worsen tissue damage. Her research on inflammatory mechanisms of lung and liver injury has advanced efforts to develop medical countermeasures against chemical threats, including mustard agents. In 2011, Laskin and her brother, toxicologist Jeffrey Laskin, were part of a Rutgers-led team awarded a $23.2 million National Institutes of Health grant to develop treatments for chemical warfare agents, contributing to a research program that secured more than $42 million in federal funding.Tessa Lau52 | Co-founder & CEO, Dusty RoboticsRenowned roboticist Tessa Lau founded Mountain View, CA–based Dusty Robotics in 2018. Now, the company sells an autonomous construction robot, which prints blueprints and floor plans directly on the ground of a site, which helps contractors save time. The startup has raised a total of $70 million and was last valued at $250 million in May 2022. It’s not her first company: Lau previously cofounded Savioke Robotics, which built hotel delivery robots, and worked at famed robotics research lab Willow Garage and IBM Research. Jonathan Kozowyk for Forbes50 OVER 50 HIGHLIGHTThai Lee67 | Co-founder & CEO, SHI InternationalThai Lee became a billionaire more than a decade ago after building software reseller SHI International into an operation that today boasts revenue of $16 billion (2025 sales). Lee owns 60% of the Somerset, NJ-based business that she and her now ex-husband bought for $1 million in 1989. Lee was born in Thailand and grew up in South Korea before moving to the U.S. for high school. Her $7.5 billion stake in SHI International makes her one of America’s Richest Self-Made Women and America’s Richest Immigrants. Emily Liman63 | Harold Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Professor of Biological SciencesEmily Liman is a groundbreaking cellular physiologist whose discoveries have transformed scientists’ understanding of how humans taste flavor—and, even more importantly, how our taste buds send signals to the brain. Her lab’s 2018 discovery around sensory receptors and a protein called OTOP1 has led to better insight into how our mouths identify ammonium chloride. Liman has said recently that further research on the OTOP protein could lead to new treatments for colon cancer, because levels of OTOP2 in the colon have been linked to disease severity. Wafaa Mamilli59 | Chief Digital & Technology Officer, RocheNearly 40 million patients were treated with Roche medications last year, and Wafaa Mamilli is the executive responsible for the global biotech’s data and information operations. She was tapped for the job in 2025 after three years as CDTO for Zoetis. A veteran in the technology and life sciences arena, Mamilli spent 24 years working for Eli Lilly in a series of roles that culminated in global chief information officer. Mamilli also sits on the board of financial technology company Fiserv. Christina Maslach80 | Social PsychologistThanks to Christina Maslach, we understand not just what job burnout is, but the factors that contribute to it and, ideally, how to prevent it. When she began her research in the 1970s, the term didn’t exist; today, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is one of the most widely-used tools for measuring burnout. “I still see people saying, ‘we're not going to work, and we’ll come back and burnout will be gone,” Maslach told Forbes in 2022. “No, it won't. If you're coming back to the same job stressors, which are the cause [of burnout]... it's not going to cure the problem.” Maja Matarić61 | Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience and Pediatrics at the University of Southern California; Co-founder, MoxieRobots are good for more than just moving boxes and stocking shelves. That’s a bet Maja Matarić made more than 20 years ago when she pioneered the field of socially assistive robotics, designing robots that can interact with children with autism, elderly people, students with anxiety and stroke survivors, offering conversation and encouragement. The Serbian-born American computer scientist says her daughter helped change the direction of her career, moving from publishing research papers to making robots that help people. In 2016, she co-founded Embodied, the company behind Moxie, an AI-powered robot companion. Steven Senne/AP50 OVER 50 HIGHLIGHTNergis Mavalvala58 | Astrophysicist; Dean of the School of Science, MITNergis Mavalvala is a pioneering astrophysicist who works within the field of quantum measurement science and the detection of gravitational waves. She was a leading member of the team behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which in 2016 detected ripples resulting from colliding black holes. In 2020, Mavalvala was appointed as dean of MIT’s School of Science, becoming the first woman to hold the position. She had previously served as MIT’s head of physics, during which time she cofounded the Physics Values Committee to advise the department on matters of inclusion, collaboration and mentorship. Marissa Mayer51 | Founder & CEO, Dazzle AIPerhaps most famous for being the CEO of Yahoo from 2012 until its $4.5 billion sale to Verizon in 2017, Marissa Mayer is a Silicon Valley veteran who is now taking her hard-won expertise and using it to build Dazzle AI, a startup that is aiming to improve what AI assistants can do. The company raised an $8 million seed round at a valuation of $35 million in December 2025, with Forerunner Ventures leading the round. “As a leader, Marissa embodies the ambition and bravery that’s essential to taking this kind of big swing,” Forerunner founding partner Kirsten Green said at the time. Vivienne Ming54 | Theoretical neuroscientist; Founder & Executive Chair, The Human TrustVivienne Ming’s career as a “professional mad scientist” is entirely due to a flip of a coin she made while a student trying to decide between focusing on economics and cognitive science. The latter won out, and Ming has become a scientific expert on maximizing human potential. In 2023, she founded The Human Trust, a nonprofit data and research center dedicated to understanding and changing human health and economic outcomes. Earlier this year, she published the book, Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People, to better inform the public about how to thrive when AI is dominating so much of our lives. M-ZAude Oliva 58 | MIT Director, MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab; Senior Research Scientist, MITAude Oliva has spent decades studying how people see, remember and interpret the world—and using those insights to build more capable artificial intelligence. This year, she became the inaugural MIT director of the new MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, overseeing research in AI, algorithms and quantum computing. She also cofounded Perceptual Insights, a startup that helps AI companies and investors evaluate how well AI systems perform in real-world tasks rather than just benchmark tests. With more than 200 scientific publications, Oliva is a leading voice at the intersection of human and machine intelligence. Ritu Narayan53 | Co-founder & CEO, ZumWith her $1.7 billion startup Zum, veteran Silicon Valley exec Ritu Narayan is bringing AI to America’s stodgiest icon: the yellow school bus. The idea for the company, which she cofounded with her brothers in 2015, stemmed from her own difficulties in finding reliable transportation for her kids to get to and from their own pre- and elementary schools. “My mom as an educator in India had left her job for the same reason,” Narayan told Forbes. “And I'm here sitting in Silicon Valley at the center of innovation and I'm also thinking: Would I have to leave my job, my career?” Today, Zum works by leasing bus yards, buying buses and small student shuttle vans, and connecting those buses (via a tablet and GPS) to an app that allows parents and teachers alike to track the buses on their routes. Think Uber for school buses. Revenue in 2025 hit $333 million, up 35% from 2024 with 5,000 schools nationwide paying for the service. Yamini Rangan53 | CEO, Hubspot Yamini Rangan became CEO of New York Stock Exchange-listed marketing software company HubSpot in 2021, succeeding co-founder Brian Halligan in 2021. Since then, the company has doubled its revenue to $3.1 billion and became profitable for the first time on an annual basis with $45.9 million net income in 2025. (HubSpot’s share price has slumped 64% over that time, along with other software stocks, over fears that artificial intelligence could disrupt its business.) The former Dropbox and Workday executive was born in India and moved to the U.S. to study a masters in computer engineering and then a MBA at the University of California, Berkeley. Shubhi Rao59 | Founder & CEO, UplevylShubhi Rao’s career had spanned leadership roles at Ford Motor, Tesco, Alphabet/Google and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco when, in 2020, she got an idea for a startup. Rao realized that the data around women in the workplace and life issues that can pull them out of the workplace (think: menopause and caregiving) is fragmented across each state. What if there was a one-stop, AI-powered shop that could help organizations and executives make more informed decisions? From this, Uplevyl was born and officially launched in 2021; today its services are used by Evercore, Ancestry.com, Equal Rights Advocates and more. Jennifer Rumsey52 | Chair and CEO, CumminsJennifer Rumsey is the first woman to serve as CEO of engine giant Cummins. When she got the job in 2022, her focus was to expand the company’s core business of building diesel-powered engines for heavy-duty trucks and commercial vehicles with lower-carbon powertrains using batteries and hydrogen. Demand for those cleaner options hasn’t grown as fast as hoped for, particularly as U.S. emissions and efficiency targets have been dialed back. Still, Cummins’ revenue has continued to rise as it benefits from surging demand for its power generators: revenue hit $33.7 billion in 2025 and could rise a further 10% this year.Heather Shoemaker56 | Founder and CEO, Language I/O Growing up in Alaska, Heather Shoemaker thought knowing another language was like having a “superpower.” In 2013, she started Language I/O, a company that helps English-speaking customer support agents communicate with customers in more than 150 other languages. Today, its AI software has translated over one billion words and works inside systems such as Salesforce, Zendesk and ServiceNow. Shoemaker says she faced so much gender bias while trying to raise funding for her startup that she considered changing her name and voice using AI to sound like a man—but eventually decided against it.Ellen Stofan65 | Under Secretary for Science and Research, Smithsonian InstitutionPlanetary geologist Ellen Stofan has spent her career expanding our understanding of worlds beyond Earth. Since turning 50, she has held some of the nation's most influential science leadership roles, serving as NASA's chief scientist before becoming the first woman to direct the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Today, as the Smithsonian's under secretary for science and research, she oversees its science museums, research centers, the National Zoo and Smithsonian Libraries and Archives while advancing research on topics ranging from biodiversity to climate change. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic77 | Mikati Foundation Professor Of Biomedical Engineering And Medical Sciences, Columbia UniversityColumbia biomedical engineering professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic is focused on the regeneration of human tissues, bones and organs. Her research lab at Columbia is home to the national Tissue Engineering Resource Center and is also a part of CELL-MET, a multi-institutional National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in Cellular Metamaterials. Earlier this year Vunjak-Novakovic received the prestigious L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Award, which goes to just five distinguished women in science every year. She also sits on the board of EpiBone, a biotech startup focused on skeletal regeneration. Susie Wee56 | Co-founder and CEO, DevAIWith a Ph.D in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and experience as a CTO for cloud and developer businesses at HPE and Cisco, Susie Wee knows more than a little about the information technology industry. In 2024, she took that knowledge to co-found DevAI, an early-stage startup building AI agents that can address pain points in enterprise technology operations. In 2025, DevAI raised an oversubscribed $6 million seed round of funding to further scale its enterprise offerings. Beth Wozniak61 | Chair and CEO, nVentBeth Wozniak runs nVent, a $3.9 billion (2025 revenue) electrical manufacturer that sells a range of products needed by data centers, including cooling and climate control systems, electronics cabinets, racks and power connection equipment. Its products are also used in industrial automation applications, by utilities and for renewable energy projects. She’s led the company since it was spun off from Pentair in 2018 and was promoted to chair in 2023. Before that, Wozniak ran two Pentair divisions after spending 25 years at Honeywell, which included senior management roles in environmental controls, combustion systems and sensors.Laura Yecies62 | CEO, OsteoboostOne in every two women over the age of 50 will break a bone due to osteoporosis, but Laura Yecies is working to reduce that risk. As the CEO of Osteoboost, Yecies oversees a company making the first FDA-cleared wearable device shown to slow bone loss in postmenopausal women with osteopenia. The product uses vibration technology in a wearable belt that goes around a person’s hips, and earlier this year the company secured $8 million in funding to better scale its commercial reach. “My grandmother had osteoporosis, my mother has it,” Yecies has said. “It’s exciting, several years later in this early stage of commercialization, to see the demand and interest from patients and doctors.” Michelle Zhou58 | Managing Director, Center for Advanced AI at Accenture Michell Zhou’s 30-year career as a computer scientist and AI researcher has revolved around one central question: How can AI be used to better understand humans? At IBM Watson Group, she invented algorithms that could glean a person’s characteristics by analyzing their writing. In 2015, she cofounded Juji, a startup that helped firms build chatbots that give personalized “empathetic” responses— without writing any code. Now at Accenture she’s helping large enterprises and thousands of employees leverage the technology internally to improve their business.Daphne Zohar56 | Co-founder & CEO, Seaport Therapeutics Daphne Zohar is co-founder and CEO of Seaport Therapeutics, a biotech company developing next-generation drugs for anxiety and depression. Its pre-clinical drug for generalized anxiety disorder, for example, is designed to avoid liver metabolism and be absorbed via the intestinal lymphatic system, which should allow it to be given at lower dose with reduced risk. Zohar, a drug development powerhouse, had previously been co-founder and CEO of PureTech, which helped launch more than a dozen biotech companies, including antipsychotic drug developer Karuna, acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb for $14 billion in 2024. Seaport launched PureTech with $100 million in funding in April 2024, went public in May and now has a market cap of $1.1 billion.