Vera Rubin was a Jewish astronomer born in 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents immigrated to the US. She Attended Vassar College, Cornell University, and Georgetown University. Throughout her graduate studies she experienced gender discrimination including not being allowed in her adviser’s office. In 1965 she became the 1^st female observer at Palomar Observatory and created a women’s bathroom while there. While at the Carnegie Institution, she collaborated with Kent Ford and came up with the Rubin-Ford Effect which is an "anisotropy in the expansion of the Universe on a scale of around 100 million [light years] as revealed by a study of the motions of a sample of spiral galaxies." Initially she worked on controversial subjects such as galaxy clusters and quasars, then she began studying rotation and outer reaches of galaxy which lead to discoveries concerning dark matter haloes, angular motion, and the galaxy rotation problem. She was discouraged throughout her career from working in the field of science, but she persevered. Her achievements include:

• computations proved that galaxies must contain at least five to ten times as much dark matter as ordinary matter. This information was later verified by radio astronomers, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and images of gravitational lensing. Her study also inspired a theory of non-Newtonian gravity on galactic scales.
• Discovering that some gas and stars moved in the opposite direction to the rotation of the rest of the galaxy. Provided the first evidence for galaxy mergers and the process by which galaxies.
• Advocated for more women in the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Further Reading:

• Rubin, Vera (1997). Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters. Masters of Modern Physics. Woodbury, New York City: Springer Verlag/AIP Press.
• Alan Lightman, Roberta Brawer (1992). Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists. Harvard University Press.

• Rubin, Vera; Ford, Jr., W. Kent (1970). "Rotation of the Andromeda Nebula from a Spectroscopic Survey of Emission Regions". The Astrophysical Journal. 159: 379ff.
• Rubin, Vera; Roberts, M. S.; Graham, J. A.; Ford Jr., W. K.; Thonnard, N. (1976). "Motion of the Galaxy and the Local Group Determined from the Velocity Anisotropy of Distant Sc I Galaxies. I. The Data". The Astronomical Journal. 81: 687.
• Rubin, Vera; Roberts, M. S.; Graham, J. A.; Ford Jr., W. K.; Thonnard, N. (1976). "Motion of the Galaxy and the Local Group Determined from the Velocity Anisotropy of Distant Sc I Galaxies. II. The Analysis for the Motion". The Astronomical Journal. 81: 719ff.
• Rubin, Vera; Thonnard, N.; Ford, Jr., W. K. (1980). "Rotational Properties of 21 SC Galaxies With a Large Range of Luminosities and Radii". The Astrophysical Journal. 238: