When she attended the University of Manitoba, Yvonne Brill was told in no uncertain terms that because of her gender, she could not study engineering. Undaunted, she studied mathematics and chemistry instead.

Good move. Brill graduated at the top of her class and later earned a Master’s in Chemistry from the University of Southern California.

Her academic performance earned her a job at Douglas Aircraft in California where she began working on the designs of the first satellite system, which would become the foundation for the RAND Corporation.

“No one had the right degrees back then, so it didn’t matter,” she said later. “I didn’t have the engineering but the engineers didn’t have the chemistry and math.”

It is believed during the she was the only woman working on rocket science in the United States in the 1940s. Brill developed the propulsion system (for which she earned a patent) that kept communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits. Her system is now the industry standard.

She worked for two prominent New Jersey companies - Wright Aeronautical and RCA - where she contributed to propulsion systems for NASA missions, including the space shuttle and the Mars Observer.

Her awards are legion. One of them, ironically, was the prestigious American Association of Engineering Societies’ John Fritz Medal, despite never officially getting an engineer’s license.

She also won the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and to cap her career, she was presented the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama in 2011.

When Brill was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2010, two of her fellow inductees were Spencer Silver and Arthur Fry, inventors of the Post-It note. In its article, the Washington Post noted it took two men to invent an adhesive stationary, but only one woman to figure out how to keep satellites in orbit around the Earth.