Suma Krishnan spent decades working for other people before building a $4 billion biotech company based on her own inventions. Today, one of her FDA-approved drugs holds potential solutions for rare genetic diseases. She and the 49 STEM standouts on this list are actively advancing the world’s understanding of medicine, meteorology and large language models.
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Kristi Anseth
56 | Distinguished Professor, University of Colorado Boulder; Cofounder, Mosaic Biosciences
Kristi Anseth is one of the nation’s leading chemical and biomedical engineers, inventing tissue substitutes that restore or improve function and advance treatments for everything from broken bones to diseased heart valves. Recently, she’s had major breakthroughs in understanding why some cardiac treatments don’t work for women like they do for men. “We saw in many of our tissue-engineered models that the sex of our ‘cells’ mattered,” she said. Anseth is one of a small group of innovators who have been elected to all three national academies — Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
Alicia Boler Davis
56 | CEO, Alto Pharmacy
Engineer Alicia Boler Davis’ career started at GM, where she became the first Black woman to serve as a plant manager and later rose to executive vice president for global manufacturing. At her next stop, Amazon, she was the senior executive overseeing global fulfillment during the pandemic and the first Black woman to be part of the exclusive “S-Team” leadership circle. Appointed Alto’s CEO in 2022, she guided a digital pharmacy with nationwide mail delivery and courier and pickup services in 12 metropolitan areas. Alto was recently acquired by Paulus Holdings (in a deal that valued Alto between $1 billion – $1.5 billion) and is being operated through the firm’s new Fuze Health brand. Boler’s next stop is a corporation where she once interned: Ford. In October, she’ll become the president of Ford Pro, the commercial fleet division of the automaker.
Kimberly Budil
59 | Director, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Kimberly Budil took the reins of one of the nation’s premier science laboratories—one with a storied history of developing nuclear weapons—in 2021. Since then, she’s overseen the first lab demonstration of a fusion ignition and the lab’s installation of the world’s fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, a $600 million project that began in 2023. Budil started her career at the lab in 1987 as a graduate student and had a three-year stint as vice president for national labs at the University of California Office of the President, before returning to Livermore, Calif. Now with 9,500 employees, the lab is helping to shape the national program in inertial fusion energy.
Teresa Carlson
62 | Founding President, General Catalyst Institute
Teresa Carlson spent most of her 50s building Amazon Web Services’ worldwide public sector division from the ground up, starting with two employees and growing to 12,000 employees with clients across 172 countries. After subsequent stops at Splunk, Flexport and Microsoft, last year she became the founding president of the General Catalyst Institute, the initiative of the $36 billion AUM venture capital firm to bring tech founders and companies to the policymakers’ table in Washington. “I’ve always believed that the most powerful innovations happen when unlikely collaborators come together.”
Karen Clark
68 | Founder, Karen Clark & Co
Karen Clark founded the first catastrophe modeling company in 1987 and, in doing so, created an industry. She continues to release new models to help businesses, insurers and policymakers in 50 countries keep up with the escalating perils of hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires and other threats. In a property database update released in March 2025, Clark said her technology maps some $100 trillion in total risk exposure (accounting for post-disaster construction costs and population growth) in the U.S. alone. “What are the chances of a $1 billion versus a $10 billion hurricane loss?” Clark recently told the Insurance Information Institute. “You need probabilities so you can evaluate how likely you are to have a solvency-impairing event and how much reinsurance you want to purchase.”
50 OVER 50 HIGHLIGHT
Carolina Cruz-Neira
60 | Director of the Institute of Simulation and Training, University of Central Florida
Carolina Cruz-Neira pioneered the CAVE virtual reality system, which allows multiple people to have an immersive experience in the same space. The technology is used worldwide from gaming and art installations to military training. Her open-source and public domain discoveries gave rise to VR systems that can cost as much as $10 million. Cruz-Neira intended to become a professional ballet dancer until a knee injury led her to engineering. “One of my biggest challenges has been championing unconventional ideas, especially early in my career, when I didn’t fit the typical mold,” she says.
Victoria Coleman
65 | Chief Executive Officer, Acubed; Head of North America Research & Technology, Airbus
Victoria Coleman is a former director of the federal defense research agency DARPA and served as the U.S. Air Force’s chief scientist before moving to Airbus’ Silicon Valley innovation center, Acubed, in 2024. Coleman has played a leadership role in the CHIPS for America Act, aimed at rebuilding the domestic semiconductor sector and led the Microelectronics Commons, a $2 billion Pentagon program to accelerate semiconductor innovation into manufacturing. At Acubed, she led the launch of an AI-driven platform for airline operations and initiatives in autonomous flight and machine learning.
France Anne Córdova
77 | President, Science Philanthropy Alliance
An astrophysicist with 150 research papers to her name, France Anne Córdova is one of the nation’s most influential living scientists. Today, she is the president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, an organization that works to increase philanthropy to basic science research (across myriad disciplines) and which, in 2024, influenced $174 million in funding to this research. From 2014 to 2020, Córdova was director of the $8.5 billion National Science Foundation (NSF); before that, she served as president of Purdue University, where she established a college of health and human sciences. Earlier in her career (in 1993) she was named NASA’s chief scientist, the first woman and youngest person to hold that position at the time.
Toral Cowieson
57 | CEO, The Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium is the international body that allows smartphones and computers to exchange text written in any language or with symbols, standardizing digital characters like dates, times and emojis. Toral Cowieson leads a worldwide team of volunteer programmers and linguists that help people connect using their native languages and avoid conflicting encodings. Cowieson says her multicultural background — born in India and raised in Chicago and New Orleans — gives her a passion for helping people of all countries and cultures communicate.
Sarah Friar
52 | CFO, OpenAI
The first CFO of the buzziest AI company in the market, Sarah Friar was recruited to OpenAI in 2024 to help scale operations and lead its growth strategy. She came to the role after serving as CEO at Nextdoor for six years. Previously, she served as CFO at Block (formerly Square) and, earlier in her career, SVP of finance at Salesforce. With Friar at the helm of its growth, OpenAI has nearly doubled its valuation from $157 billion in October 2024 to $300 billion in March. Aside from her day job, Friar runs Ladies Who Launch, a nonprofit she cofounded in 2013 to support female entrepreneurs.
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Jane Grogan
59 | Head of Research, Biogen
Jane Grogan joined Biogen in 2023 after a two-decade career that included research at Genentech in immunology and immuno-oncology and as chief scientific officer at gene-editing company Graphite Bio and T-cell company ArsenalBio. Grogan arrived at Biogen as it sought to reinvigorate its processes for moving drug candidates more efficiently through the arduous approval process. Grogan gained a following outside of biotech as co-host of the podcast, “Two Scientists Walk into a Bar,” where complex research topics are broken down for an everyday audience.
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Yvonne Greenstreet
63 | CEO, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
Yvonne Greenstreet began her career as an OB-GYN in London, where she says she started dreaming about making a bigger impact, launching a 30-year career in the biopharma industry. At the Nasdaq-traded Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (market cap: $42.9 billion), Greenstreet leads a quest to turn the Nobel-prize-winning science of RNA interference into a new class of medicines. During Greenstreet’s tenure so far, the Massachusetts-based Alnylam has earned FDA approval for six medicines and is currently developing 25 others for a range of afflictions, including Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, hypertension and Huntington’s disease.
Noosheen Hashemi
62 | Cofounder & CEO, January AI
In 2017, at the age of 54—after years of working for other people and also raising her children—Nooshen Hashemi cofounded January AI, a technology company that uses generative AI to predict a person’s glucose response to food without the use of an invasive body sensor. The technology works by taking a person’s demographic information and cross-referencing that with AI-ingested nutritional information for all types of foods. Hashemi launched the company with seed funding from Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and YouTube cofounder Steve Chen. Earlier in her career, Hashemi spent a decade at Oracle.
Kate Johnson
57 | President and CEO, Lumen Technologies
Kate Johnson sees Lumen Technologies’ fiber network as the backbone of the AI economy and has forged partnerships with Microsoft and Google Cloud to bring that vision to fruition. The veteran technology executive joined Lumen in 2022, following roles at Microsoft, GE Digital and Oracle. She has developed a following as a leadership theorist following her talks on reviving the $4.5 billion (market cap) company’s culture among its 24,000 employees to make it more competitive. In May 2025, Johnson engineered the sale of Lumen’s consumer fiber business to AT&T for $5.75 billion; the deal is expected to close in 2026 and will help Lumen restructure some of its debt.
Anne Jordan
58 | Cofounder & Chief Customer Officer, Pyx Health
Medtech entrepreneurs Anne and Cindy Jordan had settled into early retirement in 2018 when their adult daughter Rylie’s deteriorating mental health spiraled into a fatal overdose. Rylie’s profound sense of loneliness inspired the founding of Pyx Health, a mental health platform that insurance companies in all 50 states can provide as a benefit. Pyx Health offers resources and a trained Pyx team member or chatbot to interact with and to provide community contacts, like support groups, for further connection. “This business has deep personal meaning and community impact that I’m proud of. It feels good to do good,” Anne Jordan said.
Cindy Jordan
53 | Cofounder & CEO, Pyx Health
A former police officer, Cindy Jordan says she has a unique perspective on the gaps in diagnosis and treatment of loneliness and chronic health disorders that has helped shape Pyx Health’s combination of interactive technology and resource navigation. More than 80 health plan providers across all 50 states include Pyx Health as a feature. The company recently acquired FarmboxRx, which delivers fruits and vegetables as a healthcare intervention that builds customer trust in the platform. Food insecurity is a leading social barrier identified by Pyx Health members, Jordan says.
Cynthia Kenyon
71 | Vice President, Aging Research, Calico
Cynthia Kenyon is one of the world’s leading experts on the human body’s aging process. Thirty years ago, she made a pioneering discovery about a gene mutation in a roundworm that turned out to have implications for how we understand human longevity. Today, at Calico Labs—which conducts research on potential therapeutics for diseases related to aging—Kenyon leads scientists looking for pathways to longer, healthier lives. Calico Labs was founded by Alphabet Inc., and has about 325 employees and $3.5 billion in funding from AbbVie and Alphabet.
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Ada Monzón
60 | Chief Meteorologist, WAPA TV and WKAQ Radio
Ada Monzón is Puerto Rico’s first female meteorologist and, during Category 4 Hurricane Maria in 2017, became a lifeline for more than 3 million people. Inspired to a career in science by her mother, aunt and grandmother who taught math, science and history, Monzón says she’s wanted to be a meteorologist since she was a child. She is also the founder of the EcoExploratorio: Museum of Sciences of Puerto Rico, which seeks to inspire children’s curiosity in science and environmental conservation.
Jill Kolesar
59 | College of Pharmacy Dean, University of Iowa
Jill Kolesar focuses her research on developing new treatments for cancer and ensuring the treatments are accessible to patients in underserved areas. Kolesar pioneered the use of engineered extracellular vesicles (small fluid-filled sacs) for treating ovarian and other cancers, and in 2024 received $10 million in grant funding from the Biden White House. She is also the founder of two biotech startups, Helix Diagnostics and VesiCure Technologies, both built on her lab work, and holds nine patents for her discoveries.
Suma Krishnan
60 | Cofounder & President, Krystal Biotech
Trained as an organic chemist, Krishnan was in her late 40s when she had the idea for a topical gene therapy to treat a rare skin disorder called dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, in which the skin becomes as fragile as butterfly wings. In 2016, at 51, she and her husband cofounded (and self-funded with around $5 million they had made mainly from previous biotech companies) Pittsburgh-based Krystal Biotech. Today, it’s worth more than $4 billion (market cap) and has one FDA-approved therapy on the market, with others in the works. “You have to be brave and bold to do this,” says Krishnan, an Indian immigrant. “I was never afraid of risk-taking. I never felt like I needed a stable job.”
Elaine Larsen
58 | President, Larsen Motorsports
The two-time world champion jet car driver is one of only three women in the world to compete at speeds exceeding 300 miles per hour. Larsen’s other big win is found at Larsen Motorsports on Florida’s Space Coast, where hundreds of future rocket engineers train as interns in a partnership with Florida Institute of Technology and go on to seed the booming space industry. Another 20,000 students of all ages have been introduced to STEM careers through outreach programs through her non-profit, Blazing Trails.
Connie Lehman
63 | Founder, Clairity
Connie Lehman is one of the nation’s foremost experts on breast MRI, mammography and ultrasound, but wanted to give women a tool to better predict their risk for breast cancer. Most of the women diagnosed with breast cancer have no family history and nearly half have no identifiable risk factors. This spring, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted de novo authorization to Clairity Breast, the first AI-powered platform that predicts the risk of developing breast cancer over the next five years using only a standard mammogram. The technology reveals subtle patterns in routine images invisible to the human eye. Clairity plans to begin rolling out the tech to care providers this year.
Ivana Magovčević-Liebisch
58 | Founder & CEO, Vigil Neuroscience
Ivana Magovčević-Liebisch founded Vigil Neuroscience to focus on developing therapies for neurodegenerative diseases by targeting microglia, the brain’s immune cells. She founded the company in 2020 and, in May, entered into an agreement to be acquired by Sanofi for $470 million. With a Harvard PhD in genetics, Magovčević-Liebisch’s career in biotech spans 25 years; she’s consistently investigated treatments for rare diseases. One of Vigil’s therapies is intended to be a treatment for ALSP, an inherited and fatal neurological disease caused by a gene mutation.
50 OVER 50 HIGHLIGHT
Quyen Nguyen
52 | Founder & CEO, Alume Biosciences
Quyen Nguyen collaborated with the late Nobel Laureate Roger Tsien to develop a method of illuminating a patient’s nerves during surgery to better protect them from being inadvertently cut. The drug, Bevonescein, is now in clinical trials. An MD/PhD who is also a professor at the University of California, San Diego, Nguyen treats and operates on patients with facial nerve disorders and diseases of the ear and skull base. Alume has raised more than $30 million to support the clinical development of Bevonescein.
Ashley Magargee
52 | CEO, Genentech
Ashley Magargee became the first woman to hold the CEO position at Genentech in 2024, overseeing the Roche Group subsidiary with over 13,500 employees. This spring, she announced that Genentech is building a $700 million manufacturing plant in North Carolina to expand its ability to produce metabolic medicines. Magargee started her career on Capitol Hill focusing on health policy for former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) and then as an assistant principal at a Catholic school in Harlem, before earning an MBA from Harvard University and switching careers. She has said her mother’s battle with cancer motivated her to focus on innovating better treatments.
Pamela Marrone
68 | Cofounder & Executive Chair, Invasive Species Corporation
Invasive species cause billions of dollars in economic and environmental damage each year, and there are few solutions that don’t have other environmental consequences, says Pamela Marrone, whose nature-based products earned her induction this year to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. After starting and leading three bio-ag companies and selling them to larger entities, including Bayer CropScience, Marrone’s latest venture focuses on six major invasive species groups, including zebra mussels and toxic algae, both of which damage our water ecosystems.
Svetlana Mojsov
77 | Research Associate Professor, The Rockefeller University
Svetlana Mojsov’s discovery of GLP-1 and its role in insulin secretion and blood glucose led to a revolutionary class of medicines—and fueled one of the biggest stories across medicine and culture today as drug companies have leveraged the discovery into the development of Ozempic and Wegovy. The achievement earned her and her collaborators the 2024 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, a prize considered “America’s Nobel.” Mojsov initially had to fight to be recognized for her role in the discovery, waging a 10-year battle to have the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issue corrected patents when her name was left off the original filings.
Monica Molenaar
51 | Cofounder and Co-CEO, Alloy Women’s Health
Alloy Women’s Health is a digital menopause healthcare platform offering treatment from board-certified, menopause-trained physicians across all 50 states. Monica Molenaar began exploring options after a surgery at the age of 40 brought on medical menopause and revealed the “shocking lack of care, guidance and empathy available to women in midlife.” In the past year, Molenaar has helped lead the company to a $16 million Series A funding round, launched a physician-guided weight program and achieved profitability.
Valerie Montgomery Rice
64 | President, CEO, Morehouse School of Medicine
The first woman to lead the Morehouse School of Medicine, Valerie Montgomery Rice was named the sixth president of the historically-Black independent medical institution in July 2014. Montgomery Rice, a renowned infertility specialist and researcher who focuses on reproductive medicine, ovarian cancer and menopause, and was appointed to the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science in 2022 by former President Joe Biden. She also founded the Center for Women’s Health Research in 2003, one of the U.S.’s first research centers dedicated to studying why certain diseases disproportionately impact women of color.
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Eva Pittas
58 | Cofounder, President & COO, Thoropass
Thoropass is a platform that combines audit and assessment with compliance automation, helping businesses streamline their processes. Pittas cofounded Thoropass at 52, after founding a boutique consulting firm and more than 20 years at Citigroup, where she led IT control, compliance and vendor management. “Starting a venture-backed tech company at that stage of life—and in a field where female founders are still rare—was both challenging and deeply rewarding,” she tells Forbes. Pittas has raised nearly $100 million for Thoropass; the company has an annual run rate north of $30 million and is valued by Pitchbook at $390 million.
Deb Muller
59 | Founder & CEO, HR Acuity
Human resources veteran Deb Muller grew a four-person software development company to bring consistency to workplace investigations and employee performance management into a global operation with over 150 employees. HR Acuity software helps businesses organize their processes and documentation so workplace issues are handled consistently. Muller’s client list includes companies such as Honda, AAA, Sony Music, Darden, and more. “Leading the charge to elevate employee relations as a strategic, data-driven function… nothing is more rewarding than seeing my vision become a force for good,” Muller told Forbes.
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Barbara O’Neill
60 | Global Chief Information Security Officer, EY
During Barbara O’Neill’s 28-year tenure at EY information security, she’s seen her role transform from being one deep inside the company’s IT services to one of international stature. As EY’s first Global CISO, O’Neill leads a team responsible for protecting the corporation’s massive digital footprint and suite of services for clients across 150 countries, work carried out by nearly 400,000 employees. She was a contributor to the World Economic Forum’s guidance on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity issued earlier this year.
Meerah Rajavel
54 | Chief Information Officer, Palo Alto Networks
With a market cap of more than $130 billion and more than 15,000 employees, Meerah Rajavel leads the global IT team of one of the world’s largest cybersecurity companies, Palo Alto Networks. Rajavel is at the forefront of not only current cybersecurity challenges, but looming threats driven by AI that grow faster and harder to detect as the technology advances. A Forbes CIO Next 2021 listee, Rajavel’s career spans 25 years across top IT companies, including Cisco, McAfee and Forcepoint. A year ago, she accomplished a personal goal of running a marathon on all seven continents.
Stella Sarraf
51 | Founder & CEO, Spinogenix
Stella Sarraf wants to make neurodegenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and ALS not only treatable, but reversible. It sounds like something out of science fiction, but the most promise lies in her company’s keystone drug (currently called “SPG302”), a once-a-day tablet that works to restore the brain’s synapses—a process that could reverse cognitive decline. The drug is currently in Phase 2 clinical trials in Australia and the U.S., where the FDA has granted Spinogenix approval for its “Expanded Access Program” to treat 200 ALS patients. “We’re doing something extremely novel and innovative; no one’s ever done this,” Sarraf told Forbes in April.
Vicki Sato
77 | Chair, VirBiotechnology
Vicki Sato is a biologist whose research has advanced treatments for HIV, cystic fibrosis and thrombosis, and she says she hopes that her current advisory work will lead to therapies for “certain genetic forms of hearing loss and epilepsy.” Sato currently serves as the chair of VirBiotechnology (a publicly traded biotech that does drug discovery in infectious diseases and cancer); she also chairs the board of Denali Therapeutics, a nearly $2 billion (market cap) company targeting therapies for neurodegeneration. Earlier in her career, Sato was the president of Vertex Pharmaceuticals and VP of research at Biogen. “Very few people have had as profound an impact developing life-saving medicines as Vicki Sato,” said the Harvard Centennial Medal committee in 2022.
Amy Schulman
64 | Managing Partner, Polaris Partners; cofounder, Polaris Innovation Fund
Polaris Partners is a multi-billion-dollar investor in health tech, developing digital health, gene editing and data science innovations. Schulman joined Polaris as a managing partner in 2014 and, three years later, founded the Polaris Innovation Fund to help accelerate the commercial availability of promising scientific breakthroughs. Before joining Polaris, Schulman served as Pfizer’s general counsel and also led Pfizer Consumer Healthcare and Pfizer Nutrition (which sold to Nestle for nearly $12 billion). She also cofounded an oral-drug company, Lyndra, with famed MIT inventor Robert Langer in 2015.
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Chéri Smith
56 | Founder & CEO, Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy
Clean energy industry veteran Chéri Smith was visiting tribal lands in Montana when she observed a stark contradiction: The reservation was crisscrossed by power lines, but the tribe had no ownership or role in energy production. A descendant of the Mi’kmaq tribe, Smith left her senior role at Tesla to found the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, a nonprofit whose goal is to bring economic and environmental benefits to Indigenous communities through generating solar power. The alliance has guided over 100 tribes in clean energy projects and secured more than $454 million in federal funding.
Deeannah Seymour
53 | Cofounder & CEO, pH-D Feminine Health
Deeannah Seymour turned an awkward visit to the doctor’s office into a multi-million-dollar company in Nashville, producing over-the-counter, pharmaceutical-grade boric acid-based feminine care products. PH-D Feminine Health’s products are now sold at 55,000 stores across the U.S. and Canada, including at mass retailers like Walmart, CVS and Stop & Shop. “I’ve heard from women in tears thanking us for giving them their confidence back, from couples who say our product saved their marriages, and from doctors who say we’ve ‘changed the way they practice medicine,’ reducing antibiotic use by over 50%,” Seymour says.
Julia Somerdin
54 | Cofounder & CEO, Labby
After cofounding milk-testing startup Labby in 2017, Julia Somerdin withstood a perfect storm of troubles in 2022: She faced a personal health crisis, had her cofounder pulled away by other obligations and became the startup’s sole employee. Armed with $250,000 she won at a New York ag-tech competition later that year, she rebuilt the company from the ground up, focusing on a niche customer group of dairy farmers. Labby has since secured innovation research grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation for its AI-enhanced technology and formed partnerships with Cornell’s agritech program and nonprofit DairyOne to enhance its testing capabilities.
Jen Sovada
52 | Founder, Boadicea Solutions; General Manager, Public Sector, Claroty
After spending 25 years climbing the ranks of the U.S. Air Force, Jen Sovada applied the expertise she gained in intelligence and national security to leadership roles in the private sector. She’s the founder and CEO of Boadicea Solutions, a tech consulting firm that advises startups on how to work with the U.S. government; she’s a senior advisor for SandboxAQ, an AI- and quantum-focused tech company that spun out of Alphabet; and in April, she joined cyber protection company Claroty as their head of public sector engagement. Sovada is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, where she teaches classes on quantum information sciences and national security.
Carrie Stokes
50 | CEO & President, Barge Design Solutions
In March, Carrie Stokes stepped into the lead role at the Nashville-based architecture and engineering firm that takes on large-scale infrastructure projects and has nearly 600 employees. Stokes started as a summer intern there 30 years ago. “I’ve said ‘yes’ to opportunities, even when they felt outside my comfort zone,” she said. Barge’s projects include renovating the water treatment plant for the city of Auburn, Alabama; redesigning Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to accommodate energy research; and building new facilities at the Armed Forces Reserve Center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California.
Wendy Strgar
63 | Founder & CEO, Good Clean Love
To develop the products that became Good Clean Love, Wendy Strgar enlisted the expertise of a Johns Hopkins biophysicist who studied vaginal infections and barrier contraceptive technologies. The collaboration yielded an organic alternative to the harsh chemicals in personal lubricants and other products, mimicking natural moisture to support the vaginal microbiome. “Expanding our understanding of biomimicry in product development for women’s health has great promise in delivering better results both in consumer goods and medical prescriptions,” she said.
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Sunita Williams
59 | Astronaut, NASA
With 62 hours and six minutes of spacewalk time, Sunita Williams holds the world record for women and is fourth overall on the all-time list. At 58, Williams became the first woman to fly on a flight test of an orbital spacecraft aboard the Boeing Crew Flight Test in 2024, a mission that was initially set to last eight days but lasted more than nine months after multiple technical problems stranded her on the International Space Station, eventually returning to Earth in March. She has logged 608 days in space over three space missions.
Katie Szyman
59 | CEO, Masimo
Masimo is the $8.7 billion (market cap) global medical technology company behind pulse oximetry, one of the most common medical measurements. Katie Szyman was appointed its CEO in January after leading the critical care business at Edwards Lifesciences for over a decade and through its acquisition by BD. There, she was lauded for accelerating revenue growth by shifting to AI technology, aiding clinicians in decision-making and returning hospital patients home faster.
Melinda Trego
61 | Cofounder, EyeTech Digital Systems
Melinda Trego is responsible for tools—including speech-generating software and eye-gazing technology—that allow people with verbal disabilities and degenerative conditions to communicate with their eyes. She cofounded EyeTech with her brother, Robert Chappell, in 1996, leaving a career in aerospace engineering at Orbital Sciences and Honeywell Aerospace. EyeTech’s eye tracking technology can be used to operate an on-screen mouse, keyboard, and even wheelchairs with just eye movement data translated into mouse commands. The tech is used by more than 10,000 people in over 35 countries.
Kara Trott
64 | Founder, Quantum Health
Kara Trott pivoted from a corporate attorney to healthcare founder in 1999 after noticing that consumers frequently seemed confused about their healthcare plans. That year, she founded Quantum Health, a healthcare navigation platform that helps people connect with care coordinators, decode their deductibles and find in-network providers. Today, the company has more than 500 corporate clients and more than 3 million members, and Trott sits as senior adviser and board chair.
Kathy Warden
55 | CEO and President, Northrop Grumman
Kathy Warden was named CEO of defense giant Northrop Grumman in 2019, overseeing nearly 100,000 employees at more than 550 facilities covering all 50 states and another 25 countries. Her more than $24 million in annual compensation puts her in the top five earners among female CEOs, according to an Associated Press analysis. Prior to joining Northrop Grumman in 2008, Warden held leadership roles at General Dynamics and the Veridian Corporation and is also recognized for her expertise in cybersecurity.
Robin Washington
62 | Chief Operating and Financial Officer, Salesforce
Robin Washington had served on Salesforce’s board since 2013 when she moved this year into a newly created role leading growth, operations and financial strategy. Salesforce has a market cap of more than $250 billion and has more than 72,000 employees. Washington has a 25-year career in corporate leadership with roles at Gilead Sciences, Hyperion Solutions and PeopleSoft. She currently serves on the boards of Alphabet Inc., and previously served on the boards of Eikon Therapeutics, Honeywell International and Vertiv Holdings Co.
Aimei Wei
59 | Founder & CTO, Stellar Cyber
A career engineer, Aimei Wei spent more than a decade at various software companies, small and large—including eight years as a senior software engineer at Cisco—before she ventured out as founder of security analytics company Stellar Cyber in March 2015. Under her leadership, and with more than $100 million in funding, the company has become a pioneer in the security industry—it launched the Open Cybersecurity Alliance in March to improve compatibility and integration with other cybersecurity vendors and enhance threat detection and response abilities for businesses.
Maky Zanganeh
54 | Co-CEO, Summit Therapeutics
Maky Zanganeh’s Summit Therapeutics’ market cap is nearing $20 billion due to investor interest in its lung cancer drug prospect—and with a stake worth $1.5 billion, Zanganeh has become one of just 38 self-made female billionaires in the U.S. An Iranian immigrant, Zanganeh has decades of experience in robotic surgery and drug development. Before taking the reins at Summit in 2020, she served as chief operating officer at Pharmacyclics, whose breakthrough blood cancer therapy was acquired by AbbVie in a $21 billion deal. Zanganeh herself is a cancer survivor; she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019.
This article was originally published on forbes.com.
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