Sheila Widnall
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031263
Today is the birthday of Sheila Widnall, an aerospace researcher who was born on this date in 1938 in Tacoma, Washington. For most of her career, she has been a professor at MIT with a research focus on fluid mechanics. In 1988, she was the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (see a PDF of the announcement in Physics Today: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2814894). In 1993, she was appointed as the US Secretary of the Air Force, making her the first woman to hold that position as well as the first woman to lead an entire branch of the the US military. She returned to MIT in 1997 and in 2003, she was a member of the board of investigation that examined the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
Date in History: 13 July 1938
