Cool Scientist

Mae Jemison
When Mae Jemison orbited the Earth aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, she spotted her hometown of Chicago from above. As a kindergartner in the Windy City, Jemison was so sure she wanted to be a scientist that she spent hours in the library reading and learning as much as she could. She eventually became a medical doctor and in 1987 was accepted into NASA’s astronaut program. Five years later, she became the first African American woman to travel to space.

Charles William Beebe
Charles William Beebe first tried diving in the 1920s. Back then, divers wore huge helmets and couldn’t travel very deep. Beebe, whose curiosity about nature had already led him from country to country and animal to animal, wanted to go deeper and to see more. He found a friend, Otis Barton, who could help. It was in Barton’s “bathysphere,” the first deep-sea vessel, that Beebe was able to dive nearly half a mile deep and see a whole new part of the world. He set a record that stood for fifteen years.

Kristi Curry Rogers
Before many of her first-grade friends could even say the word “paleontologist,” Kristi Curry Rogers had already decided that was what she wanted to be. Now the curator of paleontology at the Science Museum of Minnesota, she’s paid to dig in the dirt for dinosaur bones. She’s been on digs in Argentina, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar. Everywhere she goes, she studies the evolution of dinosaurs and tries to solve the mystery of what life was like for those giant creatures millions of years ago.

Greg Cuomo
Greg Cuomo wants to make Minnesota a leader in the field of renewable energy. That’s why he helped erect a 365-foot tall tower for a 1.65 megawatt wind turbine at the University of Minnesota’s Renewable Energy Research and Demonstration Center near the university’s Morris campus. That turbine, the first of its kind at a public university in this country, generates more than half of the power the UMM campus uses and sells extra power to the local power company.

Mitchel Resnick
Mitchel Resnick thinks everyone needs a little more kindergarten. That’s why he leads the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he works with people, especially children, to discover creative learning opportunities. He believes kids learn by playing, that they can solve problems with creativity, and that they should be given the opportunity to learn new things in new ways. This inspired him to create “Crickets,” programmable LEGO blocks with an artistic bent that were precursors to LEGO’s MindStorm robotics kits.