Indigenous people are not entering science for the first time. They are extending long traditions of observation, engineering, medicine and responsibility into some of the most advanced work happening today.
The ten people in this countdown have helped build the International Space Station, design hardware for Mars, detect ripples in spacetime, protect water, improve patient care and open doors for the next generation. This is an editorial countdown, not a claim that achievement can be reduced to a single ranking. Each story shows a different way knowledge can move: outward into space, inward toward the structure of matter, and homeward in service of community.
10. Dr. Otakuye Conroy-Ben: Reading community health in wastewater
Otakuye Conroy-Ben, an Oglala Lakota environmental engineer born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, studies what polluted water can reveal about public health. At Arizona State University, her work spans wastewater epidemiology, endocrine-disrupting chemicals and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
She became the first Lakota person to earn a doctorate in engineering, according to ASU. Her laboratory research has direct applications for Tribal communities, including projects that build local capacity to monitor pathogens in wastewater while respecting the importance of community partnership and data governance.
9. Dr. Lori Arviso Alvord: Surgery that treats the whole person
Lori Arviso Alvord was the first Navajo woman to become a board-certified surgeon. Her achievement was not simply crossing a professional barrier. It also changed how many readers and clinicians think about healing.
After returning to work with Navajo patients, Alvord drew on both her Stanford surgical training and Diné understandings of balance, relationship and environment. The U.S. National Library of Medicine describes her approach as culturally competent care that attends to the whole patient. Her memoir, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, brought that conversation to a much wider audience.
8. Dr. Karletta Chief: Water science led by community priorities
Diné hydrologist Karletta Chief grew up in Black Mesa, Arizona, where water, mining and community health were never abstract subjects. Today she is a University of Arizona professor and director of the Indigenous Resilience Center.
Chief helped lead community-centered research after the 2015 Gold King Mine spill affected the San Juan River and Diné communities. Her work also addresses drought, watershed hydrology, climate adaptation and food-energy-water sovereignty. The University of Arizona emphasizes a defining principle of the center: Native Nations should help drive the research questions that affect them.
7. Dr. Fred Begay: From a federal boarding school to nuclear physics
Fred Begay, also known as Fred Young, was Diné and Ute. As a child, he was taken to a federal boarding school that trained him for farm work. After military service in the Korean War, he pursued higher education and ultimately earned a doctorate in nuclear physics from the University of New Mexico.
Begay spent decades at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on thermonuclear fusion and laser research. A NASA biography also notes his work on high-energy gamma rays and the ways he examined relationships between Diné thought and modern physics. His life resists the false idea that Indigenous knowledge and advanced science belong in separate worlds.
6. Corey Gray: Helping humanity hear spacetime
Corey Gray, whose mother is Siksika, has worked at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory at Hanford since 1998. He was part of the operations team when LIGO made the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, confirming a prediction Einstein made a century earlier.
The discovery led to the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the project’s founders. Gray’s own contribution was the exacting work required to operate a detector sensitive enough to register collisions between black holes. He also asked his mother, Sharon Yellowfly, to translate the discovery announcement into Blackfoot. Caltech recounts how that act joined frontier physics with language revitalization.
5. Jerry Elliott High Eagle: The calculations behind Apollo 13’s return
Jerry Elliott High Eagle, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation with Osage heritage, worked for NASA for four decades as an aerospace physicist and mission-operations specialist. During the Apollo 13 crisis, he served on the team calculating the spacecraft’s return trajectory.
NASA’s mission-operations team collectively received the Presidential Medal of Freedom after the astronauts came home safely. Elliott later became a founding member of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, helping make STEM pathways more visible and reachable for Native students. AISES credits him with playing an instrumental role in Apollo 13’s safe return.
4. Mary Golda Ross: Calculating routes to other worlds
Cherokee engineer Mary Golda Ross was one of the early engineers in Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects group, better known as Skunk Works. Much of her work remained classified, but the public record is extraordinary enough.
Ross developed spacecraft requirements and contributed to NASA’s 1963 Interplanetary Flight Handbook, including flight paths to Mars and Venus. She also spent decades mentoring women and Native students in engineering. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum describes her work as foundational to the U.S. aerospace industry.
3. Aaron Yazzie: Building the tools that sample Mars
Diné mechanical engineer Aaron Yazzie grew up on the Navajo Nation and earned his engineering degree at Stanford before joining NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His hardware has gone where very little human-made technology ever has.
Yazzie tested Curiosity’s sample-acquisition system and helped develop drill bits for the Perseverance rover. Those tools allow the rover to core Martian rock and preserve samples that may help scientists understand the planet’s history. In a NASA profile, Yazzie explains that studying Mars is also a way of asking how rocky planets and life itself began. His outreach tells Indigenous students that they can belong at NASA without leaving their identity behind.
2. Nicole Aunapu Mann: Commanding a new chapter in spaceflight
Nicole Aunapu Mann is registered with the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes. A Marine Corps colonel, test pilot and mechanical engineer, she commanded NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission to the International Space Station in 2022.
Mann became the first Indigenous woman from NASA to fly in space. Over 157 days in orbit, she contributed to hundreds of experiments and completed two spacewalks totaling 14 hours and two minutes. Her NASA biography records the technical milestones, but her visibility carries another kind of force: Native girls can now see an Indigenous woman commanding a spacecraft as present-tense reality.
1. John Herrington: The first enrolled Tribal citizen in space
When John Herrington launched aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2002, he became the first enrolled member of a Native Nation to travel to space. Herrington, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, carried the Nation’s flag and a flute with him on the STS-113 mission.
He completed three spacewalks totaling 19 hours and 55 minutes while helping install and activate the P1 truss on the International Space Station. NASA documents the mission; generations of students know the larger meaning. Herrington did not leave his Chickasaw identity on Earth. He carried it into orbit and then spent years encouraging young people to imagine themselves there too.
The pattern is bigger than any one breakthrough
These ten lives stretch across generations and disciplines, but a common pattern emerges. Technical excellence matters. So do mentorship, language, community accountability and the right of Indigenous Nations to shape the science conducted with and for them.
Organizations such as AISES, Tribal colleges and universities, Native-led research centers and community science programs are building the next chapter now. Share the name on this list that surprised you most, then put another Indigenous scientist or engineer in the comments so more people can learn their story.
