59 | President & CEO, Society for Science

As a teenager, Maya Ajmera was a finalist in the Science Talent Search. Today, she leads the nonprofit behind the prestigious competition and several of the world's largest pre-college STEM programs. Since becoming president and CEO of Society for Science in 2014, she secured a $100 million, 10-year sponsorship for the Science Talent Search, launched an $11 million STEM outreach initiative to expand opportunities for underserved students and helped grow Science News into a media enterprise reaching more than 23 million readers.

Lauren Antonoff dropped out of college, eventually going back to complete her undergrad degree at age 52. But that didn’t stop her from a distinguished career in tech: nearly two decades at Microsoft, president of GoDaddy’s U.S. small business unit, and now, the CEO of publicly-traded Life 360, which sells devices and apps to keep track of the whereabouts of everything from kids to keys and electronics. Since Antonoff took over in August 2025, she’s doubled the San Francisco-based company’s revenue, grown its user base to 100 million people (monthly) and booked its first profit. It now trades at a $6 billion market cap.

60 | Director, Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical Research

Over a career that has included 17 years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, eight years as the physician-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital (where she was the first woman appointed to the role) and Columbia University, Katrina Armstrong’s work has focused on clinical epidemiology, medical decision-making and health equity. In June 2026, Armstrong was appointed to launch the Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical Research at Columbia, where she will lead efforts to advance scientific discovery and develop the next generation of the biomedical workforce.

55 | Founder, Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR)

With some 800 peer-reviewed publications and more than 80 U.S. patents to her name, Zhenan Bao is a global authority on chemistry and material science. Bao joined Stanford’s chemical engineering department in 2004 and has established a lab that has advanced understanding about polymers and skin-inspired electronic materials and devices. Her work has applications for precision mental health, neurodegenerative diseases and simultaneous monitoring of brain and gut health. Bao is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors.

54 | CEO & president, GoodRx

Wendy Barnes became president and CEO of GoodRx in January 2025. The Santa Monica, California-based prescription savings company allows consumers to compare prices, get coupons, and, it claims, potentially save as much as 80% on their medications. GoodRx, which is used by nearly 25 million consumers annually, recorded just under $800 million in revenue last year and posted net income of $30 million. Before joining GoodRx (market cap: $1 billion), Barnes, who has a bachelor’s in biochemistry from the U.S. Air Force Academy and an MBA from the University of Alaska Anchorage, had been CEO of pharmacy benefits provider RxBenefits, president of Express Scripts Pharmacy and a group vice president at Rite Aid.

Charlie Blackwell-Thompson

60 | Launch Director, NASA

Charlie Blackwell-Thompson has shaped NASA history with her career. In 2016, when she was appointed to her position, Blackwell-Thompson became the first woman to serve as flight director for the space agency. She’s in charge of the planning and management of all Artemis Launch Countdown operations—which means that in April 2026, her voice was the one that sent the crew of Artemis II into a space flight that would break the distance record for human space travel. “On this historic mission, you take with you… the hopes and dreams of a new generation,” she told the astronauts moments before liftoff.

60 | Chief Sustainability Officer, FedEx

After nearly two decades leading environmental initiatives across FedEx, one of the world's largest transportation networks, chemical engineer Karen Blanks Ellis became the company's chief sustainability officer in 2024. She now oversees efforts to achieve carbon-neutral operations by 2040. Since the company set that goal, absolute emissions from FedEx-controlled operations have declined by more than 15%, even as package volume has more than doubled. In 2025, FedEx executed sustainable aviation fuel agreements covering more than 16.5 million gallons of lower-emissions blended jet fuel and expanded its electric vehicle fleet to six continents.

Marsha Anderson Bomar

74 | President, American Society of Civil Engineers

Marsha Anderson Bomar became president of the American Society of Civil Engineers in October 2025, leading that profession’s largest U.S. membership organization during a time of massive infrastructure spending and preparations for a changing climate. The Atlanta-based transportation engineer previously held senior planning roles for the city of Atlanta and MARTA, its regional transit agency. Bomar had been a member of ASCE since 1984, prior to becoming its leader, and has spent more than four decades working in transit, traffic engineering and public infrastructure roles. Her mandate is to give civil engineers a louder voice advocating for safer, more sustainable infrastructure improvements.

59 | Heritage Provider Network Professor in Immunotherapy, City of Hope

Christine Brown is helping bring CAR T-cell therapy—one of cancer medicine's biggest breakthroughs—to patients with glioblastoma. The aggressive brain cancer has a five-year survival rate of less than 10%. Her early clinical trials helped demonstrate that CAR T cells could be safely delivered to the brain, and one patient has remained in complete remission for six years. Building on those results, Brown launched a 2026 clinical trial of a gene-edited CAR T-cell therapy designed to make the treatment more effective. She now leads four ongoing clinical trials for glioblastoma.

65 | Distinguished Investigator & 2025 Nobel Laureate, Institute for Systems Biology

Mary Brunkow, a distinguished investigator at Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology, shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for discoveries related to T cells, the immune system’s safeguard to prevent the body from attacking itself. In 2001, Brunkow and Ramsdell identified the Foxp3 gene as the cause of a mutant strain of mice known as “scurfy mice,” a discovery that has important implications for understanding autoimmune diseases and developing drugs to treat them.

69 | Dean, College of Computing, Data Science and Society, UC Berkeley

Jennifer Tour Chayes has spent her career building institutions at the forefront of artificial intelligence. After co-founding three Microsoft Research labs over more than two decades, she joined UC Berkeley in 2020 to establish the College of Computing, Data Science and Society—the university's first new college in more than 50 years. A mathematician and computer scientist, Chayes has authored more than 150 scientific papers, co-invented 30 patents and now leads research applying AI to challenges ranging from cancer immunotherapy to developing materials for carbon capture.

Karen Carter became CEO of Dow in July 2026, making history as the first woman to lead the $40 billion-revenue materials science giant since its founding in 1897. She began her career at the company as an intern in 1994 and rose through a wide range of roles spanning sales and marketing, international business operations in Asia-Pacific, human resources, packaging and specialty plastics (a $23 billion segment). Before becoming CEO, Carter served as the company’s chief operating officer.

62 | Chief Marketing Officer & Open Source Advocate, SUSE

Open-source technology platform SUSE recruited veteran technology executive Margaret Dawson in 2025 to serve as its chief marketing officer and open-source advocate. Since joining the 33-year-old firm, which makes operating system Linux and a bevy of other cloud and AI products, Dawson has........

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