Betsy Devine aka Betsythedevine · CC BY-SA 3.0

A theoretical physicist who, as a junior researcher without a permanent position, worked out the theory of cosmic inflation in 1979 — the idea that the infant universe underwent a burst of exponential expansion that explains why it looks the way it does today. He formally proposed the theory in 1981 while at Stanford's SLAC, and later data from the WMAP satellite mission strongly supported it. He shared the 2014 Kavli Prize with Alexei Starobinsky and Andrei Linde for the work.