About The Author

hile spending her first eight years on remote construction sites where her father built highways and dams, Mabel Armstrong’s playmaates were often lizards, garter snakes, and the family of pack rats given her by a local logger. Her attachment to nature and biology continued until she fell in love with chemistry in high school. About the same time, she discovered science fiction and was the only girl in her high school who read the tiny collection in the school library. Ignoring teachers and counselors who discouraged her interest in science, Mabel majored in chemistry in college where she was often the only girl in a 200-student lecture room. When interviewed by a major petroleum company after graduation, she was told, “Women are not allowed in the laboratories, they work in the library doing patent searches.? An international food products company said, “You have just the training we’re looking for, but we know women marry and leave. So we don’t hire women.”

Mabel taught chemistry for twenty-five years. She now lives in rural Oregon where she still reads science fiction and is hard at work on the next Discovering Women in Science book, about women in chemistry.