Meet Mary G. Ross the first Native American female engineer. Mary Ross, of the Cherokee Tribe, was born in Park Hill, Oklahoma. In 1942, Lockheed in California hired her as a mathematician, where she worked on designing fighter jets and large planes. While she was among the many women hired while men were serving in the military during World War II, unlike her peers, she was not forced out of her job as men returned from the War. Eventually the company sent her to the University of California Los Angeles to get her professional certification in engineering, making her the first Native American woman to do so. In 1952 she became one of the 40 founding engineers of the renowned and classified Skunk Works project at Lockheed's secret Advanced Development Program. Some of the work we do know about includes preliminary design concepts for interplanetary space travel, manned space flight, ballistic missiles, and satellites in orbit above the earth. She also wrote about the feasibility and lo...