After initially studying English and music during her undergraduate years at Ohio University, Marie Tharp turned to the sciences, earning her master’s degrees in geology and mathematics, and became a #STEM pioneer for women everywhere.

Best known as the oceanographic cartographer that produced the comprehensive map of the world’s ocean floor with Dr. Bruce Heezen, Tharp made the once-mysterious “blank canvas” of the ocean depths real and tangible. “[It was] a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to piece together,” she said in 1999. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime – an once-in-the-history-of-the-world – opportunity for anyone, but especially a woman in the 1940s.”