Lisa Randall (String Theory)

Theoretical physics is a realm stereotypically dominated by men and, even among the rare women who choose it, Lisa Randall doesn’t fit the mold. She spends her free time on intense rock climbing expeditions but spends her professional days exploring the implications of multidimensional brane worlds as a phenomenologist.
Dr. Randall was the first tenured woman in the physics department at Princeton University. She was also the first tenured female theoretical physicist at MIT and later at Harvard, where she has been since 2001.
Randall rose to prominence among nonphysicists with her 2005 topic Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions. Among other things, this resulted in her appearance on Comedy Central’s wildly popular mock political pundit show, The Colbert Report.
Given her success as a woman in a male-dominated field, it’s not surprising that she has impressive credentials. One of the most intriguing models to come out of her analysis of brane world scenarios are the Randall-Sundrum models, which explore the possibility of gravity behaving differently off of our own 3-brane.