On May 15, the Embassy of Sweden will host a conversation with Sophie Nyman, a trained cultural heritage specialist and the director of design and content at the Swedish National Maritime and Transport Museums. Sophie is traveling to Washington, DC from Sweden to talk about the unique cultural heritage beneath the surface of the Baltic Sea, what scientists can teach us about the regal ship Vasa from the 17th century, and the role women have played in shipbuilding.

New research shows that one of Vasa’s crew members was a woman. For some years, scientists have thought that one of the skeletons found on board the warship Vasa ship in 1961, whom they designated G, might be a woman. In early April of this year, a collaboration between the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology at Uppsala University in Sweden and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Delaware confirmed the result. The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory specializes in human remains DNA testing from deceased military personnel and has established a new testing method for the analysis of many different genetic variants, which was used to confirm that G was a woman.