5 Women Who Revolutionized Technology

At the National Inventors Hall of Fame^® (NIHF), we have the privilege of honoring the lives and accomplishments of some of the world’s greatest inventors. As we highlight some of our trailblazing NIHF Inductees during Women’s History Month, it’s important to prioritize efforts to further diversify STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields and ensure that tomorrow’s STEM leaders include a wide array of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences.

Below, we invite you to learn about five NIHF Inductees who have revolutionized technology and whose contributions continue to benefit people around the world.

Marian Croak

While working at Bell Labs (later AT&T), Hall of Famer Marian Croak became passionate about creating ways to use technology to positively impact people’s lives. This led her to explore the possibilities of digital communications. Her development of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology meant that instead of using a traditional phone line to communicate, the internet could instead be used to transmit voice messages. Today, the widespread use of VoIP technology is vital for remote work, conferencing and personal communications. With more than 200 patents in her name, today Croak works at Google and is an advocate for encouraging women and young girls to pursue careers in engineering.

Kristina Johnson

Hall of Famer Kristina Johnson, co-inventor of polarization-control technology, is widely recognized as a pioneer in optoelectrical processing systems, 3D imaging and color management systems. Together with fellow NIHF Inductee Gary Sharp, she worked on birefringent materials — materials whose refractive index depends on the polarization and propagation direction of light. Birefringent filters are used extensively in the entertainment and electronics industries. Johnson and Sharp sold their company, ColorLink, to RealD, a leader in the 3D imaging field. After having served as chancellor of the State University of New York, since August 2020 Johnson has served as president of The Ohio State University.

Chieko Asakawa

When she was just 11 years old, a swimming accident left NIHF Inductee Chieko Asakawa blind by the age of 14. However, she did not allow this to prevent her from pursuing her passion for technology. In fact, she set out to create ways to make technology more accessible. After attending computer science courses for the blind at Nippon Lighthouse, in 1985 she joined IBM Tokyo as a researcher. While there, she developed the Home Page Reader — the first practical voice browser that allowed blind and visually impaired users to navigate the internet. A landmark in accessible technology, the Home Page Reader was translated into 11 languages and influenced many web-to-speech systems that came after it.

Radia Perlman

Hall of Famer Radia Perlman has played an essential role in driving the growth and development of the internet by creating the Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP), which transformed Ethernet into a technology that can create large networks with hundreds of thousands of nodes. Additionally, Perlman created techniques that helped make internet routing both reliable and scalable. She holds more than 100 U.S. patents, is the author of “Interconnections,” a popular textbook on network routing and bridging, and is a Dell Technologies Fellow.

Esther Sans Takeuchi

As a recognized expert in energy storage, NIHF Inductee Esther Sans Takeuchi led efforts to invent and refine lithium/silver vanadium oxide (Li/SVO) battery technology, utilized in many of today’s implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs). Thanks to their high density and ability to support intermittent high-power pulses, they are considered the ideal batteries to use in ICDs and have helped save thousands of lives. Takeuchi has over 150 U.S. patents and is the recipient of many honors, including most recently, the 2022 NAS Award in Chemical Sciences.

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