Mary Golda Ross (August 9, 1908 – April 29, 2008) was the first known Native American female engineer. She was one of the 40 founding engineers of the renowned secret Skunk Works project at Lockheed Corporation. She worked at Lockheed until her retirement in 1973, where she was known for her work on "preliminary design concepts for interplanetary space travel, manned and unmanned earth-orbiting flights, the earliest studies of orbiting satellites for both defense and civilian purposes."Mary G. Ross was born in the small town of Park Hill, Oklahoma, the second of five children of William Wallace and Mary Henrietta Moore Ross. She was the great-granddaughter of the Cherokee Chief John Ross. Mary was a talented child, while still a young girl she was sent to live with her grandparents in the Cherokee Nation capital of Tahlequah, where she attended primary and secondary school. When she was 16, Ross enrolled in Northeastern State Teachers' College in Tahlequah. She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1928, at age 20. She received her master's degree from the Colorado State Teachers College in Greeley in 1938, taking "every astronomy class they had."
After retiring in 1973, Ross lived in Los Altos, California, and worked to recruit young women and Native American youth into engineering careers. Since the 1950s, she had been a member of the Society of Women Engineers. She also supported the American Indians in Science and Engineering Society (AISES) and the Council of Energy Resource Tribes. At age 96, wearing her "first traditional Cherokee dress" of green calico, made by her niece, she participated in the opening ceremonies of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Upon her death in 2008, she left a $400,000 endowment to that museum.
