Margot Lee Shetterly

Margot Lee Shetterly is an American author and researcher. Born in Hampton, Virginia, in 1969—daughter of a NASA researcher—she grew up in a community where Black scientists and engineers worked at Langley Research Center and were a normal presence in her childhood world. She studied at the University of Virginia and worked in investment banking before dedicating years to researching her debut book. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016) tells the story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and other Black female mathematicians at NASA who computed trajectories for the earliest American space missions during an era of racial and gender segregation. The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2017 and was adapted into the 2016 Academy Award-nominated film Hidden Figures starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe. Shetterly is the founder of the Human Computer Project, which is documenting all of the women who worked as computers at NASA. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.