They are the People who Inspire me

Jocelyn Bell Burnell 🌌

The New York Times: Growing up in a Quaker household, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was raised to believe that she had as much right to an education as anyone else. But as a girl in the 1940s in Northern Ireland, her enthusiasm for the sciences was met with hostility from teachers and male students.
In 1967, Burnell made a discovery that altered our perception of the universe. As a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University assisting the astronomer Anthony Hewish, she discovered pulsars — compact, spinning celestial objects that give off beams of radiation, like cosmic lighthouses.
Learn more »

Carl Sagan ⭐

National Geographic: "He worked very hard for his students, got them jobs, worried about their education, many of them very well placed now," says William Poundstone, author of Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos. "If you talk to the people he inspired, who knew him, they are uniformly effusive."

"Part of what made him great was the number of things he pursued," says NASA's David Morrison, director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Morrison marveled both at Sagan's breadth of accomplishments and his lack of self-importance.

Photo courtesy of NASA.
Learn more »

Neil deGrasse Tyson 📖

Britannica.com: "American astronomer who popularized science with his books and frequent appearances on radio and television.
In 2014 he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a “continuation” (as he termed it) of astronomer Carl Sagan’s popular series Cosmos (1980). Learn more »

Ole Rømer 〰

"...in 1676, made the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light." Wikipedia
Learn more »

Thomas Andrews 🛳

Together with his team of naval architects, they designed the RMS Titanic.
Learn more »

Sebastião Salgado 📷

"(...) Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist.
In September and October 2007, Salgado displayed his photographs of coffee workers from India, Guatemala, Ethiopia and Brazil at the Brazilian Embassy in London. The aim of the project was to raise public awareness of the origins of the popular drink." (Wikipedia)

Robin Williams 👀

"Actor and comedian Robin Williams was known for his fast-paced, improvisational performance style and for his performances in films like 'Good Will Hunting' and 'Dead Poets Society.'"

Gregory Feith ✈

"American former Senior Air Safety Investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). He currently works as a consultant on aviation safety and security matters in the private sector, and as the aviation expert for NBC and MSNBC. He also serves as the technical advisor in a number of television programs such as Mayday (also known as Air Disasters in the United States and Air Crash Investigation in other parts of the world), Seconds From Disaster, and Why Planes Crash while maintaining a busy speaking schedule."

Giordano Bruno 🌟

"He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets, and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no "center"." (Wikipedia)
Learn more »

Galileo Galilei 🌔

"Galileo's championing of Copernican heliocentrism (Earth rotating daily and revolving around the sun) was met with opposition from within the Catholic Church and from some astronomers. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that heliocentrism was foolish, absurd, and heretical since it contradicted Holy Scripture." (Wikipedia)
Learn more »

Joshua Bell 🎻

"In an experiment initiated by The Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten, Bell donned a baseball cap and played as an incognito busker at the Metro subway station L'Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. on January 12, 2007. The experiment was videotaped on hidden camera; of the 1,097 people who passed by, seven stopped to listen to him, and one recognized him. For his nearly 45-minute performance, Bell collected $32.17 from 27 passersby (excluding $20 from the one who recognized him). Three days earlier, he earned considerably more playing the same repertoire at a concert. Weingarten won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his article on the experiment." (Wikipedia)
Learn more »

Robert Bilott 🚱

"The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare"

"American environmental attorney from Cincinnati, Ohio. Bilott is known for the lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of plaintiffs from West Virginia. Bilott has spent more than twenty years litigating hazardous dumping of the chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS).

After the independent scientific panel jointly selected by the parties (but required under the settlement to be paid for by DuPont) found that there was a probable link between drinking PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia, and ulcerative colitis, Bilott began opening individual personal-injury lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of affected users of the Ohio and West Virginia water supplies, which by 2015 numbered over 3,500. After winning the first three for $19.7 million, in 2017 DuPont agreed to settle the remainder of the then-pending cases for $671.7 million. Dozens of additional cases filed after the 2017 settlement were settled in 2021 for an additional $83 million (announced in conjunction with a $4 billion settlement between DuPont and its spin-off, Chemours, over PFAS liabilities), bringing the total settlement value in the personal injury cases for those exposed to PFOA in their drinking water to over $753 million." (Wikipedia)
Learn more »

România, te iubesc!

RO: Echipă de jurnalişti care şi-a propus să facă din România un loc mai bun. Munca şi rezultatele lor sunt o reală sursă de inspiraţie.

Dăruiește Viață

RO: "Sistemul de sănătate românesc este bolnav și are nevoie de terapie intensivă, pe toate planurile: al resurselor și al organizării, al evaluării și recompensării performanței, al accesului la informații, al standardului etic și al optimismului că lucrurile se pot schimba. Am fondat Dăruiește Viață, în 2012, pentru a reforma din temelii sistemul medical românesc. Alături de Carmen Uscatu și Oana Gheorghiu, fondatoarele asociației, s-a alăturat inițiativei, ca Președinte Onorific, Paula Herlo. Hai și tu alături de noi!"

Eli Etherton (right)

"IT consultant who created a popular instructional online video series called ‘Eli the Computer Guy.’"

Margarita Salas Falgueras

"Spanish scientist Margarita Salas Falgueras invented a faster, simpler and more reliable way to replicate trace amounts of DNA into quantities large enough for full genomic testing. Her invention based on phi29 DNA polymerase is now used widely in oncology, forensics and archaeology."

Louis Rossmann

"American repair technician, YouTube personality, and right to repair activist. He is the owner and operator of Rossmann Repair Group in New York City, a computer repair shop established in 2007 which specializes in logic board-level repair of MacBooks."

David A. Sinclair 🍂

"It’s a seemingly undeniable truth that aging is inevitable. But what if everything we’ve been taught to believe about aging is wrong? What if we could choose our lifespan?"