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Immortalized in a series honoring notable women, Vera Cooper Rubin, MS ’51, is the first Cornellian ever featured on a coin

By Joe Wilensky

Pioneering Cornellians often make change—but for the first time, you’ll find a Cornellian on your change! Vera Cooper Rubin, MS ’51, a groundbreaking astronomer whose life’s work included procuring the scientific evidence to prove the existence of dark matter, is being featured in the 2025 cohort of the American Women Quarters Program.

According to Big Red history expert Corey Ryan Earle ’07, it’s believed to be the first time a Cornellian has ever been depicted on a circulating U.S. coin.

The program, which the U.S. Mint launched in 2022 in partnership with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, has honored five women annually with individual designs on the reverse side of the quarter.

Past honorees include poet Maya Angelou, pilot Bessie Coleman, musician Celia Cruz, astronaut Sally Ride, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, surgeon Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, and early film star Anna May Wong.

Portrait of Vera Rubin in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery — National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Rubin’s fellow honorees for 2025—the program’s final year—are athlete Althea Gibson, Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low, disabilities activist Stacey Park Milbern, and journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells.

The five designs will be circulated throughout the country over the next several months.

“Being featured on a U.S. quarter is a big deal,” says Jay Beeton ’70, BS ’71, former director of the American Numismatic Association’s Money Museum in Colorado Springs, CO. “That’s an honor largely reserved for U.S. presidents, or iconic images.”

Vera Rubin uses the Carnegie Institution Department of Terrestrial Magnetism's spectrograph at an 84-inch telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in an undated photo — Carnegie Institution for Science Archives

And, he notes, prior to the launch of the quarters program in 2022, only three women—Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, and Sacagawea—had ever been featured on circulating (non-commemorative) coins.

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The “Standing Liberty” quarter, produced from 1916–30, did depict a female figure, albeit allegorical. As Earle notes, it has its own Cornell connection: it was designed by Hermon Atkins MacNeil, who taught industrial arts on the Hill in the 1880s and sculpted the Ezra statue on the Arts Quad.

Being featured on a U.S. quarter is a big deal. That’s an honor largely reserved for U.S. presidents, or iconic images.
Jay Beeton ’70, BS ’71, former director of the American Numismatic Association Money Museum

The 2025 quarter also means that Rubin “becomes the only astronomer ever featured on a U.S. circulating coin—what an amazing honor,” Beeton says.

Rubin, who died in 2016 at age 88, faced pervasive sexism and initial dismissals of her research. But she gathered decades of data on the unseen material that binds galaxies and governs their rotation—and which is believed to make up more than 80% of the universe’s mass.

Vera Rubin receives the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton on September 30, 1993, at the White House as then Vice President Al Gore looks on — Carnegie Institution for Science Archives

In 1985, the body of work she presented to the International Astronomical Union fundamentally shifted scientific conceptions of the universe and opened new directions for research in both astronomy and physics.

She went on to win both the U.S. National Medal of Science and the Gold Medal from the U.K.’s Royal Astronomical Society.

“There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man,” Rubin once wrote, “that cannot be solved by a woman.”

Top: Quarter design courtesy of the U.S. Mint.

Published March 4, 2025