This is a guest post by Cecilia Vargas, a retired software developer living in Vancouver, Canada.
Esther Orozco is a Mexican cell biologist, winner of the 1997 Pasteur medal, and a 2006 laureate of the L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science.
Esther Orozco was born and raised in a small rural town in northern Mexico, where she became a school teacher. I admire her because she overcame all the social expectations for women that exist in such conservative environments and became a successful scientist. She also found time to raise 2 kids. In 1998 she ran for governor of Chihuahua state, Mexico. Last year she became president of the Autonomous University of Mexico City.
The UNESCO/Pasteur medal is awarded by UNESCO and the Paster Institute for “outstanding research contributing to a beneficial impact on human health and to the advancement of scientific knowledge in related fields such as medicine, fermentations, agriculture and food.â€
Orozco received the L’Oréal-UNESCO award for her discovery of the mechanisms and control of infections by amoebas in the tropics.
- Orozco’s wikipedia entry
- Her own blog (in Spanish).
- UNESCO/Institut Pasteur medal.
- L’Oreal/UNESCO award.
- Article in Mexican newspaper about 5 internationally-known Mexican women scientists (in Spanish). It shows Orozco’s picture.
This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Want to highlight a geek woman? Submissions are currently open for Wednesday Geek Woman posts.