Finlay became famous for his work in identifying the mosquito as a carrier of the deadly yellow fever germ. His theory was followed by the recommendation to control the mosquito population as a way to control the spread of yellow fever. His work, carried out during the 1860's finally came to prominence in 1900.

Mario Molina, Chemist

Mario Molina was born in Mexico City on March 19, 1943. He attended elementary school and high school in Mexico City and was already fascinated by science before entering high school. With the help of an aunt, Esther Molina, who was a chemist, he performed challenging experiments along the lines of those carried out by freshman chemistry students in college. After finishing his undergraduate studies in Mexico, he decided to obtain a Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry. This was not an easy task; though his training in chemical engineering was good, it was weak in mathematics, physics, as well as in various areas of basic physical chemistry - subjects such as quantum mechanics were totally alien to him in those days. At first he went to Germany and enrolled at the University of Freiburg. After spending nearly two years doing research in kinetics of polymerizations, Mario realized that he wanted to have time to study various basic subjects in order to broadenhis background and to explore other research areas. Thus, he decided to seek admission to a graduate program in the United States. Finally, in 1968 Mario enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley to pursue graduate studies in physical chemistry.

After completing his Ph.D. degree in 1972, Mario stayed for another year at Berkeley to continue research on chemical dynamics. Then, in the fall of 1973, he joined the group of Professor F. Sherwood (Sherry) Rowland as a postdoctoral fellow. Sherry offered him a list of research options: the one project that intrigued him the most consisted of finding out the environmental fate of certain very inert industrial chemicals - the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) - which had been accumulating in the atmosphere, and which at that time were thought to have no sign)ficant effects on the environment. Three months after he arrived at Irvine, Sherry and Mario developed the "CFC-ozone depletion theory."

Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work dealing with the effect of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) on the depletion of the ozone layer; his work has led to the current phasing out of the use of CFCs throughout the world.

Ellen Ochoa, first Hispanic female astronaut

As a doctoral student at Stanford, and later as a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories and NASA Ames Research Center, Dr. Ochoa investigated optical systems for performing information processing. She is a co-inventor on three patents for an optical inspection system, an optical object recognition method, and a method for noise removal in images. As Chief of the Intelligent Systems Technology Branch at Ames, she supervised 35 engineers and scientists in the research and development of computational systems for aerospace missions. Dr. Ochoa has presented numerous papers at technical conferences and in scientific journals.

Selected by NASA in January 1990, Dr. Ochoa became an astronaut in July 1991. Her technical assignments to date include flight software verification, crew representative for flight software and computer hardware development, crew representative for robotics development, testing, and training, Assistant for Space Station to the Chief of the Astronaut Office, directing crew involvement in the development and operation of the Station, and spacecraft communicator (CAPCOM) in Mission Control. A veteran of three space flights, Dr. Ochoa has logged over 719 hours in space. She was a mission specialist on STS-56 in 1993, was the Payload Commander on STS-66 in 1994, and was a mission specialist and flight engineer on STS-96 in 1999. Dr. Ochoa is assigned as a flight engineer on STS-110, a 10-day mission to the International Space Station, scheduled for launch in early 2002.

Lydia Villa-Komaroff, Molecular Biologist

Lydia was born in Las Vegas, New Mexico (not Nevada) and became interested in science at an early age. Between her junior and senior year of high school, she attended a National Science Foundation Summer Science Training Program at Texas College in Tyler, Texas. "As a Mexican American, she had to overcome her cultural training to pursue a career in science. 'Traditionally, Hispanic women are not socialized to believe they can earn a living, much less be scientists,' Komaroff says." Despite the traditions of her culture, Lydia entered the University of Washington in Seattle in 1965 and entered the Department of Biology at M.I.T. in the fall of 1970 and began her thesis research in the spring of 1972. Her thesis was entitled "Translation of Poliovirus RNA in Eukaryotic Cell-Free Systems" and her thesis advisors were Dr. David Baltimore and Dr. Harvey Lodish. She received a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship and did post graduate work with Dr. Fotis Kafatos at Harvard University.

Because Cambridge had banned recombinant DNA work, she spent a year at Cold Spring Harbor as a guest in Dr. Tom Maniatis' laboratory. On returning to Cambridge, she joined Dr. Walter Gilbert's group. She joined the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1978. In 1985, she and her group moved to the department neurology at Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Dr. Villa-Komaroff is an internationally recognized molecular biologist. She was a key member of the team, directed by Dr. Walter Gilbert, that first demonstrated that bacterial cells could produce insulin. This pioneering work is widely cited and is described in the book "Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Clone the Insulin Gene" by Stephen Hall. Most recently her research focused on the role of a growth factor related to insulin in brain development. She has served on a number of review committees for the National Institutes of Health and chaired the reviews of the first human brain transplant studies submitted for federal support. She is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Biology Directorate of the National Science Foundation, the congressionally mandated NSF committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering, and was an invited participant in the Forum on Science in the National Interest sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Adriana C. Ocampo Uria, Planetary Geologist

Ms. Ocampo is a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where she has worked since 1973. Ms. Ocampo was appointed since 1998 to work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Headquarters Offices at Washington D.C. During her appointment at NASA Headquarters she will be working at the Office of Space Science and the Office of External Relations as a program executive for Space Science missions with international collaboration, among them it includes missions with the European Space Agency , Russia and Japan. She will also be the Russian (and all the former Soviet Union independent countries), Spain and Portugal desk officer for NASA’s Office of External Relations. Presently she is continuing with her responsibilities in the Office of Space Science and is also working in the Office of Earth Science in the Solid Earth and Natural Hazards Division.

Ms. Ocampo completed her Bachelor of Science at California State University of Los Angeles in Geology with an emphasis on Planetary Science. She completed her Master of Science in Geology at California State University Northridge with a thesis on the Chicxulub impact crater. Born in Colombia and raised in Argentina, she arrived in the United States 30 years ago. She came to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (CalTech/JPL, NASA center) as a high school student where she had the opportunity to gain experience in planetary science. She worked on the Viking mission to Mars as part of the Imaging Team. She was involved in sequence planning and data analysis of Mars images, specifically planning the observations of the moons Phobos and Deimos and searching for a ring and other satellites around Mars. This work culminated in a NASA publication of a Phobos Atlas, which was used in planning the Phobos Russian mission to that moon.

During the Voyager mission to the outer planets, she worked on the Navigation and Mission Planning Team, which included the development of the Saturn ephemerides. She has also worked at the JPL Multi-mission Image Processing Laboratory where she developed an expertise in image processing applied to Earth and planetary remote sensing. She also worked in Galileo’s Flight Projects Mission Operations as the science coordinator to the Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS),. NIMS is an instrument on board the Galileo mission to Jupiter. As a NIMS Science Coordinator in the Galileo mission, she was responsible for Europa’s science observations planning, sequencing and data analysis. She also worked on the Mars Observer Project as the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) instrument science representative. She was a co-investigator in two Discovery proposals; Hermes to explore the planet Mercury and in an Io-Europa Mapper to Jupiter's moons. In addition to her work with planetary missions, Ms. Ocampo has conducted research on the Chicxulub impact crater since 1988. She was the first to recognize that a ring of sinkholes or "cenotes" found in the Yucatan peninsula was related to the buried impact crater. The Chicxulub impact caused the extinction of more than 50% of the Earth species, including the dinosaurs, at the end of the Cretaceous period (65 million years ago). She was given a NASA grant to continue her research on the effects of the impact on the Earth's biosphere and how those effects relate to the extinction. While conducting field research in Belize in 1991, she discovered the only know surface exposure of the most proximal ejecta blanket from the Chicxulub impact. She has led three geological expeditions to Belize to study these ejecta deposits. These sites are proving to be important in understanding the role of large impacts in Earth’s history.

Ynes Enriquetta Julietta Mexia (1870-1938), Botanist

Ynés Mexía was born May 24, 1870 in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., where her father, General Enrique A. Mexía, was serving as a representative of the Mexican government under President Porfirio Díaz.

Ynes Mexia was one of the most remarkable plant collectors of this century, not only for the fact that she spent several years alone in remote areas of South and Central America, but also because she only began collecting at the age of 55. Her co ntributions to botany included a total of 8,800 numbers. She collected approximately 145,000 specimens. Two were new genera, Mexianthus mexicanus Robinson (Compositae) and Spulula quadrifida Mains (Pucciniaceae). The collections included approximately five hundred new species, primarily spermatophytes. Fifty species were named after her. Her plants were widely distributed and are now in leading botanical museums in the United States and Western Europe.

She was a social worker whose enthusiasm for botany may have developed after the death of her husband, when she enrolled as a special undergraduate student at the University of California in 1921, which led to her developing a strong interest in fieldwork. At age 59 she embarked on a two and a half year expedition to Peru and Brazil. At one point she and her team spent three months trapped by floods in a deep gorge in the Sierra del Pongo in Peru. It appears that she was not unduly perturbed at being stuck in the bottom of a 600 mile deep gorge, nor that their only means of escape, were they not to starve to death, was to build a raft and negotiate a series of dangerous whirl-pools and rapids. While she and her team waited for the waters to drop (which they didn't), she used the time productively, collecting up and down the sides of the ravine that she could reach. Finally faced with the possibility of starvation, she and her team did in fact build a raft and successfully negotiated themselves down river.

Baruj Benacerraf, Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology

Dr. Benacerraf was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 29, 1920 of Spanish-Jewish ancestry. His father, a self-made business man, was a textile merchant and importer who was born in Spanish Morocco; whereas his mother was born and raised in French Algeria and brought up in the French culture. It was decided that he should pursue his education in the United States, and the family moved to New York in 1940. He registered at Columbia University in the School of General Studies, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in 1942, having also completed the pre-medical requisites for admission to Medical School. By that time, he had elected to study biology and medicine, instead of going into the family business, as my father would have wanted. He did not realize, however, that admission to Medical School was a formidable undertaking for someone with his ethnic and foreign background in the United States of 1942. In spite of an excellent academic record at Columbia, he was refused admission by numerous medical schools and would have found it impossible to study medicine except for the kindness and support of George W. Bakeman, father of a close friend, who was then Assistant to the President of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. Learning of the difficulties, Mr. Bakeman arranged for Baruj to be interviewed and considered for one of the two remaining places in the Freshman class. While in medical school, he was drafted into the U.S. Army with the other medical students, as part of the wartime training program, and became a naturalized American citizen in 1943.

Baruj was discharged in 1947 and, motivated by intellectual curiosity, decided upon a career in medical research at a time when such a choice was not fashionable. His interest was directed, to Immunology, and particularly to the mechanism of hypersensitivity, so he sought the advice of many scientists. He was strongly urged to work with a dynamic young immunochemist, Elvin Kabat, whose laboratories were at the Neurological Institute, Columbia University School of Physicians and Surgeons.

In 1980 Benacerraf gained the Nobel Prize, along with his colleagues Dausset and Snell "for their discoveries concerning genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions. They have been responsible for turning what at first appeared as an esoteric area of basic research on inbred mice into a major biological system of the greatest significance for the understanding of cell recognition, immune responses and graft rejection."

Benacerraf's work has been generously and continuously supported since 1957 by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and for the last decade also by the National Cancer Institute.

Edgar Lara-Curzio, Hispanic Engineer of the Year, 1997

Edgar Lara-Curzio, of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, received the award for Outstanding Technical Achievements at the 1997 Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference. Secretary of Energy Federico Pena referred to Lara-Curzio as "a gifted scientist widely respected for his work in both experimental and theoretical research work with ceramic composite materials."

At Oak Ridge, Lara-Curzio is part of the High Temperature Materials Laboratory research staff, where he is principal investigator for DOE's Continuous Fiber Ceramic Composites program. A native of Mexico, Lara-Curzio holds a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from the Metropolitan University in Mexico City and a doctorate in materials engineering from Rensselaer.