. >> i want to introduce tonight speaker . -- nathalia holt. she has conducted research at caltech library and at harvard. she is a founder at massachusetts general hospital and m.i.t.. her first book is called cured, the people who defeated hiv. she has been published in the new york times, los angeles times and time magazine. in 2016 she published the work that is the basic of her talk tonight, entitled "rise of the rocket girls: the women who propelled us, from missiles to the moon to mars." that work was a bestseller and was widely praised by critics, including one who described it as immersive, evocative, and superbly written. her narrative should be required reading. another commented that when neil armstrong made his giant leap for mankind, there was womankind in the control room. it is a pleasure to welcome to the university of mary washington nathalia holt. [applause] nathalia: thank you so much. i really appreciate you having me here tonight and i am excited to talk to you about rocket girls. this is a group of pioneers whose careers shaped nasa and really made it what it

caltech campus, some of them were students and others were just young people who liked to explode things. so they did a lot of that on campus. they set off an explosion in the .ngineering building they also blasted off the side of the building, raining breakdown on students below. it was at this point that the administrators at caltech said, this is enough. you have to leave. this is where they went. this isolated canyon outside pasadena, where they could set off rockets. this important to note at time in history, the late 1930's, rocket science is considered a fringe science. no serious scientist or engineer would ever aspire to being a rocket scientist. their professors would tell them what they were trying to do was impossible. you would never be able to send a rocket into space. there was a woman who was part of this suicide squad named barberie can write -- barbie can wright. she was a computer. that meant a person who computes. the calculations for the experiments. this is one of the earliest was anomputers, he 18th-century french mathematician and astronomer. he was working