Grace Eldering

After graduating, she became an epidemiologist at Michigan's Department of Public Health.

After long days at the lab, Kendrick and her colleague Grace Eldering would tromp through the snow from house to house looking for children suffering from whooping cough, a disease that killed 6,000 children each year in the United States.

When they located a sick child, they had them cough onto a petri dish to take back to the lab.

They worked on a shoestring budget until their work caught the eye of Eleanor Roosevelt.