Born in Martinsburg, West Virginia in 1922, Kathryn Peddrew graduated from Storer College with a degree in Chemistry in 1943. As an African- American woman, she faced many challenges while pursuing a career in the sciences during this period. Kathryn had graduated from college with a chemistry degree and was hired by NACA in 1943. She would spend her entire career there, retiring in 1986. She had been raised by parents who taught her that she could be anything she wanted to be and her belief in herself never wavered, even as she endured both gender and racial discrimination in her job search before arriving at NASA. Peddrew had wanted to join the research team of one of her college professors, who studied quinine-incited deafness in New Guinea but was denied the opportunity because the team had no contingency plan for housing women separately from men. After this disappointment, Peddrew decided to shoot for the moon, applying for a position in NACA’s chemistry division after reading a job listing in a NACA bulletin. She was hired, but when administrators learned she was Black, they rescinded the offer for the chemistry job, transferring her to the computing division instead, which had a segregated section for the Black female human computers. Hired right after graduation, Peddrew was assigned to the West Area Computers at Langley, and began a career at NACA/NASA that spanned forty-three years. Involved in both aeronautical and aerospace research, Peddrew recalled the excitement at Langley when the first astronauts trained there, and the many breakthroughs made during the early space program. SOURCE https://www.storercollegealumni.org/post/copy-of-international-women-s-day-2-000-march-downtown