March is Women's History Month.
The five women are:
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Jacqueline K. Barton, California Institute of Technology's Arthur and Marian Harnish Memorial Professor in the division of chemistry, Pasadena, Calif.
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Jillian A. Buriak, associate professor of chemistry at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind.
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Linda K. Ford, a chemistry teacher at Seventeen Hills High School, Cincinnati, Ohio.
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Martha Greenblatt, professor of chemistry, Rutgers University, Piscataway, N.J.
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Madeleine Jacobs, editor-in-chief of Chemical & Engineering News, Washington, D.C.
Barton has earned the Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry. She has spent her career revealing some of the unanticipated chemistry of DNA and is best known for her pioneering experiments in DNA electron transfer.
Born and raised in New York City, she received a B.A. in chemistry from Barnard College and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Columbia University. After completing a post-doctorate at Yale University and Bell Laboratories, she took an assistant professorship at Hunter College and then returned to Columbia, where she earned a full professorship and remained there until moving to Caltech.
Among her other awards, Barton was named MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1991 and received the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award in 1985.
Buriak has won the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry. She has made "tremendous strides" in semiconductor and organometallic surface chemistry, according to colleagues. (Organometallic is defined as relating to an organic compound that usually contains metal bonded to carbon.) The stable surfaces affected by her research are used in biosensor and biomedical implant studies.
Buriak, who was born in Toronto, earned a B.A. in chemistry from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in organometallic chemistry from Universit‚ Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France. Following a two-year postdoctoral stint at Scripps, she joined the Purdue University chemistry department as an assistant professor and later served as an associate professor.
Among her awards are the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award (1997-2002), a School of Science Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award (2000), an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2000-02) and a Cottrell Teacher-Scholar Fellowship (2000-02).
Ford has earned the James Bryant Award in High School Chemistry Teaching. According to students and faculty, she uses unconventional teaching approaches that make the subject of chemistry fascinating, captivating and even thrilling. She might put on a Brazilian dress and dance to music as she combusts a methane soap bubble column. At Halloween she might dress up as the Great Chemtina as she performs chemical "magic" tricks. On Feb. 28, in honor of the birthday of her hero, Chemistry Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, Ford has her class sing and eat cake and vitamin C. Pauling was noted for his research into the health benefits of the vitamin.
Ford was born in Cincinnati, obtained her B.A. in chemistry from Ohio Wesleyan University and an M.A. in teaching from the University of Chicago. She first taught chemistry at a Chicago high school before returning to Cincinnati to teach chemistry and physics at Robert A. Taft High School in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. Later she taught at Sycamore High School, Cincinnati State Technical College and presently is teaching chemistry at Seven Hills High School.
She earned the central regional award in chemistry teaching from ACS in 2000. The Cincinnati Section of ACS reports that it received 17 letters of support for Ford, even though only five were needed.
Greenblatt has been awarded the Francis P. Garvan-John M. Olin Medal. She has focused her research on synthesizing new materials that have novel properties. Her colleagues describe her as "a leading solid-state chemist and scholar, teacher, science advocate and an outstanding role model." She considers mentoring students her most significant scientific achievement.
Born in Hungary, she arrived in the United States in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution against Stalinism. Greenblatt earned a B.S. from Brooklyn College in 1962 and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. She joined the chemistry department at Rutgers in 1974 and for more than a decade she was the only female professor in the field. Her job was to build a solid-state program, which was not common at universities at that time.
Today that program is recognized worldwide for its excellence and diversity, her colleagues say. Several years after joining Rutgers, she spent a sabbatical year at Bell Labs.
Greenblatt has more than 350 publications in materials chemistry.
Jacobs has won the ACS Award for Encouraging women into Careers in the Chemical Sciences. In 1969 she joined the weekly newsmagazine Chemical & Engineering News and was the only woman on the staff. "I quickly recognized there was a problem," she says. It didn't take her long to look into the issue. Within a year she wrote the magazine's first major story describing in depth the challenges women chemists faced in advancing. Jacobs immediately began encouraging young women to pursue chemistry careers and her strong dedication to mentoring continues today.
Born in Washington, D.C., Jacobs earned a B.S. in chemistry at George Washington University and completed a year of graduate work in organic chemistry at the University of Maryland. She left C&EN after three years for stints at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Standards and Technology, and the Smithsonian Institution, where she started as the chief science writer and then became director of the Office of Public Affairs. She returned to C&EN as managing editor in 1993 and became editor-in-chief in 1995.
Among her honors are the New York Academy of Sciences Women's History Month Award (2002), the Ruth Evelyn Sanders Distinguished Lectureship of Texas Christian University (2001), and more than three dozen writing awards.