Dr. Valerie Thomas is a physicist, data scientist, inventor, and educational leader. She demonstrated an interest in science and electronics from a young age. Although her father recommended that she should just stick to "girly things", she did not let this discourage her. In high school she learned more about physics and began to answer the question of 'what makes things tick?'. After completing high school, she attended Morgan State College, where she earned a physics degree. She then took a job at NASA helping to lay the foundation for image processing for NASA's Landsat program.

The Landsat program is NASA's longest-running mission dedicated to taking high-quality images of the Earth, to study the impacts of land usage and other human/nature-caused changes on land. She also invented the Illusion Transmitter, a setup of mirrors and cameras that capture an image and transmit it to a different location.

Dorothy Jean Johnson Vaughan (September 20, 1910 – November 10, 2008) was an American mathematician, human computer, computer programmer and schoolteacher who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and NASA, at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. In 1949, she became acting supervisor of the West Area Computers, the first African-American woman to receive a promotion and supervise a group of staff at the center.

She later was promoted officially to the position of supervisor. During her 28-year career, Vaughan prepared for the introduction of computers in the early 1960s by teaching herself and her staff the Fortran programming language. She later headed the programming section of the Analysis and Computation Division (ACD) at Langley.

Vaughan is one of the women featured in Margot Lee Shetterly's history Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016). It was adapted as a biographical film of the same name, also released in 2016.

In 2019, Vaughan was honored with the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously.