Highlighting women in sustainability science

Every year on the 8th of March, the world takes a moment to recognize both how far we have come, and work still to be done when it comes to gender pairty and equity.

We asked our entire staff to reflect on women that inspire them in their work and why, as well as the importance of including all voices in sustainability science.

Below are some some of the women that SRC staff are inspired by:

Anzurat Akobirshoeva
Anzurat Akobirshoeva has worked for the Aga Khan Foundation (Afghanistan) for more than ten years. As a Natural Resource Management Officer, she devotes her time and skills to supporting women farmers in a border district of Badakhshan Province in the north of Afghanistan.

Xuemei Bai
Xuemei Bai is a Professor at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on several frontiers of urban sustainability science and policy. She has authored/co-authored over 100 publications, including in Nature and Science.

Brigitte Baptiste
Brigitte Luis Guillermo Baptiste, Ph.D. is a transgender Colombian cultural landscape ecologist and an expert on environmental issues and biodiversity in Colombia. She has been director of the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute since 2011.

Bonnie Bassler
Bonnie L. Bassler is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University.

Sallie Chisholm
Sallie W. Chisholm is a U.S. biological oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an expert in the ecology and evolution of ocean microbes.

Sarah Cornell
Sarah Cornell works in global sustainability science, coordinating Stockholm Resilience Centre's research and international collaborations on Earth resilience

Beatrice Crona
Beatrice Crona is one of the leaders of the ‘Patterns of the Anthropocene’ research stream at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. She also leads a research programme, Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere, at the Royal Academy of Science with a focus on global economic dynamics and the biosphere.

Shirin Ebadi
Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer, a former judge and human rights activist and founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran.

Malin Falkenmark
Professor Malin Falkenmark is a globally renowned water expert whose career spans over 60 years during which she has contributed to more than 400 publications and some 20 books.

Dominique Gonçalves
Dominique Gonçalves currently works at the Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. She does research in Elephant Ecology and Behaviour, Socio-Ecological Systems

Ellika Hermansson Török
Ellika Hermansson Török was Stockholm Resilience Centre's first head of communications and now a senior advisor for the SwedBio programme at SRC working with urban challenges and opportunities in developing countries

Nur Izzati Roslan
Nur Izzati Roslan is the Operations Manager at the Juara Turtle Project on Tioman Island and a marine biologist by training. She works tirelessly to conserve and protect the sea turtle population off the east coast of Malaysia.

Jennifer Jacquet
Jennifer Jacquet is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies; Affiliated Faculty Stern School of Business; Affiliated Faculty Center for Data Science at New York University.

Ann-Mari Jansson
AnnMari Jansson known as one of the founders of the field of ecological economics, coming to this from her own background in ecology.

Ursula Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American novelist. She worked mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. Her writing was first published in the 1960s and often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, the natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality, and ethnography.

Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, sometimes regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of a "computing machine" and the first computer programmer.

Wangari Maathai
Wangari Muta Maathai was an internationally renowned Kenyan environmental political activist and Nobel laureate. In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights.

Donella (Dana) Meadows
Donella H. "Dana" Meadows was a pioneering American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer. She is best known as lead author of the influential book The Limits to Growth and Thinking in Systems: a Primer.

Mary Musgrave
Mary Musgrave was a Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at UMass Amherst and spent much of her career studying the physiology of plants in space. Her research received continuous funding from NASA for two decades.

Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom was an American political economist who shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver E. Williamson for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons". To date, she remains the only woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Susan Parnell
Susan Parnell is Associate Professor in Geography, University of Cape Town, and has taught at University of the Witwatersrand and SOAS, London, and Oxford.

Maria Schultz
Maria Schultz is the director of SwedBio, a knowledge interface that enables knowledge generation, dialogue, and exchange between practitioners, policymakers and scientists.

Karen Seto
Karen Seto is the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale School of Forestry of Environmental Studies.

Maria Sibylla Merian
Maria Sibylla Merian was a German-born naturalist and scientific illustrator. She was one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly.

Colette Wabnitz
Colette Wabnitz is a research associate at the University of British Colombia