History professor Londa Schiebinger has been named the recipient of the 2026 Centennial Medal Citation. The award recognizes a master’s or Ph.D. alumnus of the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) each year who has made “outstanding contributions to society.”

Schiebinger is a historian of sex, gender and science, best known for her work on the exclusion of women from scientific fields. At Stanford, she directs the Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering and Environment Project — an effort to enhance the integration of sex and gender analysis into research — and teaches a class of the same name. Her work examines the institutions that “rendered these exclusions invisible by making them appear natural, just, valid and reasonable,” she told Cell in an interview in 2024.

Schiebinger has been interested in the role of gender in scientific research for over four decades. She graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1974 with a degree in English before completing her master’s degree in history from Harvard University. Her Ph.D. dissertation, also completed at Harvard in 1984, was the foundation of her first two books, “The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science” and “Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science.”

Since then, Schiebinger’s work has focused on examining the mechanisms that contribute to barriers to entry for women. Her solution, known as “Schiebinger’s three fixes,” focuses on supporting women’s entry into science and engineering, reforming institutions and incorporating sex and gender analysis into research. Schiebinger has consulted for organizations such as the European Commission and the National Science Foundation to help bring this vision to life.

“Londa’s historical scholarship has given generations of scientists and students an evidence-based narrative that challenges myths about who belongs in science,” Kari Nadeau, a professor of climate and population studies at Harvard, told GSAS News. 

Evelynn Hammonds, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, also commended Schiebinger for her pioneering scholarship. “Her work is deeply researched, methodologically innovative, and always addresses the most important questions about the ways in which scientific knowledge is gendered,” Hammonds told GSAS News.