womens history sps

8/19/2019 Womens History SPS

1/35Berkeley SPS

March is…

To celebrate, the Society of Physics Students has

created posters honoring female physicists, both

modern and historical. Look for them around

LeConte!

“During Women's History Month, we remember the

ailblazers of the past, including the women who are not recorde

n our history books, and we honor their legacies by carrying

forward the valuable lessons learned from thepowerful examples they set…

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United

States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the

Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby

proclaim March 2016 as Women's History Month.”


2/35

March is…

The Society of Physics Students

has created posters honoring

female physicists, both modernand historical.

The women we’ve featured are only a smal

sample of the brilliant female physicists,scientists, and mathematicians who have

and are contributing to their fields; we

encourage you to look for and be inspired

by the work and lives of them, and manymore!

Berkeley SPS


3/35

Shirley Ann Jackson Nuclear Physicist

Shirley Ann Jackson was the secondAfrican American woman in the US to

earn a doctorate in physics, and the

first to do so at MIT, for her work on

elementary particle theory. There are

still under 100 African American

women with PhDs in physics. She hasperformed research at the Fermi

National Accelerator Lab, CERN, and

the Stanford Linear Accelerator

Center. After this, she went into

private industry at Bell Labs, where

she studied materials to be used in the

semiconductor industry. There, she was published in over 100

scientific articles on charged density waves in layered compounds,

polaronic aspects of electrons in the surface of liquid helium films,

and optical and electronic properties of semiconductor strained-layer

superlattices. She then went on to become to serve as the first

Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission under

President Bill Clinton. Jackson is now the 18th president of theRensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she has helped raise over $1

billion for philanthropic causes.

Berkeley SPS

Image from http://ethix.org/


4/35

Chien-Shiung Wu“The First lady of Physics”, “Queen of Nuclear Research”

Chien-Shiung Wu earned her PhD

in nuclear physics from UC

Berkeley in 1940, and afterwards

conducted postdoctoral research at

Radia t ion Laboratory , now

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

After moving to the East Coast, and

working for both Princeton andSmith, she joined the Manhattan

Project’s Substitute Alloy Materials

Lab, where she helped develop a

process to enrich uranium ore thatproduced large quantities of fuel for the bomb. After the war, she

became an associate research professor at Columbia, and herresearch there helped overthrow the principle of conservation of

parity, a widely-accepted theory at the time. Her colleagues Tsung-

Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang won the 1957 Nobel prize for this

achievement, but Wu’s contributions were not awarded. Wu went on

to author the book Beta Decay in 1965, was appointed as the first

Pupin Professor of Physics in 1973, and was the first woman toreceive an honorary doctorate from Princeton and be elected to the

American Physical Society. She was also a recipient of the National

Medal of Science.

Berkeley SPS

Image from http://www.columbia.edu/


5/35

Mae Jemison Astronaut

Berkeley SPS

Mae Jemison was the first

African American female

astronaut. She graduated

from Stanford 1977 with a

d e g r e e i n c h e m i c a l

engineering and went onto

Cornell Medical College.

A f t e r w o r k i n g a t a

Cambodian refugee camp

in Thailand and as a Peace

Corps medical officer in

Sierra Leone and Liberia,where she taught and conducted medical research, she made a

career change and applied for NASA’s astronaut training program

in 1985. She flew on the Endeavor mission STS47, where she

conducted experiments on weightlessness and motion sickness

during her eight days in space.

Image from http://www.biography.com/


6/35

Katherine JohnsonMathematician

Katherine Johnson graduated from

high school at age 14 and from West

Virginia State College at 18 with

degrees in French and mathematics,

and went on to become the first

African American woman to

desegregate the graduate school atWest Virginia University. In 1953

she worked at NASA with a pool of

women performing mathematical

calculations. She was temporarily

assigned to an all-male flight

research team, and her work was so precise that they “forgot” toreturn her. She then worked as an aerospace technologist for 25

years, calculating the trajectory for the flight of the first American in

space, as well as the launch window for his Mercury mission. She

made backup charts for astronauts in case of electronic failures, and

when NASA first began using computers, they called upon her to

verify the computer’s numbers. Her accuracy helped establishconfidence in the new machines. She was awarded the Presidential

Medal of Freedom in 2015.

Berkeley SPS

Image from http://www.nasa.gov/


7/35

Maryam MirzakhaniMathematician

Berkeley SPS

Maryam Mirzakhani is an Iranian mathematician and professor at

Stanford, with a PhD from Harvard. Her research has contributed

to the theory of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces. In 2014, she

became the first woman to receive the Fields Medal for hercontributions to geometry and dynamical systems. Her work could

have impacts concerning theoretical physics and how the universe

came to exist because it could inform field theory. It also has

applications to engineering and material sciences, as well as the

study of prime numbers and cryptography. Despite the

applications of her work, Mirzakhani says she enjoys pure

mathematics because of the elegance and longevity of the

questions she studies.

Image from https://www.theguardian.com/


8/35

Grace HopperComputer Scientist

Berkeley SPS

Grace Hopper earned a

master’s degree and PhD in

mathemat i c s f rom Ya le

University and became a

professor at Vassar College. In

1943, she joined the NavalReserve and was assigned to the

B u r e a u o f O r d i n a n c e

Computation Project, where

she learned how to program a

Mark I computer. After the war,

she remained as a researcher

and worked with Mark II and

III computers. She went into

private industry in 1949 and oversaw the programming of the

UNIVAC computer. As well, in 1952, she created the first compiler

for computer languages, a predecessor to Common Business

Oriented Language (COBOL) that would later be used around the

world.

Image from https://en.wikipedia.org


9/35

Willie Hobbs Moore Applied Physicist

Berkeley SPS

Willie Hobbs Moore was the first African American woman to earna PhD in physics. She completed her thesis, " A Vibrational Analysis of

Secondary Chlorides" , at the University of Michigan, where she stayedafterwards to work on spectroscopic work on proteins. She

had publications in the Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy, the Journal ofChemical Physics, and the Journal of Applied Physics. She was an activist

in STEM education for minorities.

Image from http://pjenkinslab.org/


10/35

Berkeley SPS

Ellen Ochoa Astronaut

Ellen Ochoa is the current

director of the Johnson Space

Center (the second female and

first Hispanic female in this

position), and has been since

2007. She is the first Hispanicwoman to go to space and

served a nine-day mission on

the Discovery. She received a

bachelor’s degree in physics

f r om S a n D i e g o S t a t e

University and a master’s andPhD from Stanford University

in electrical engineering. She is a veteran of four space flights,

spending nearly 1,000 hours in space as a mission specialist, flight

engineer, and payload commander. She is a pioneer of spacecraft

technology, has patents on an optical inspection system, an optical

recognition method, and a method for noise removal in images.

Image from http://laslatinitas.com/


11/35

Vera Rubin Astrophysicist

Berkeley SPS

Vera Rubin earned a master’s

degree in physics from

Cornell University, where she

made one of the first

observations of deviations

from the Hubble flow in themotion of galaxies, and

received her PhD from

Georgetown University,

where her thesis concluded

that ga lax ies c lumped

together, an idea that was not

pursued again for two decades. She remained on the faculty at

Georgetown and conducted research examining the rotation of

neighboring galaxies. She conducted calculations about the rotation

of galaxies that provided strong evidence for the existence of dark

matter, and is the second woman to join the National Academy of

Sciences.

Image from http://w.astro.berkeley.edu/


12/35

Lene HauParticle Physicist and Applied Physicist

Berkeley SPS

Lene Hau received her doctorate

in physics from the University of

Aarhus in Denmark and spent

seven months researching at

CERN while working on her

doctorate. She began researching

Bose-Einstein condensate at

Harvard University as a postdoc,

and eventually became a tenured

professor of applied physics and

physics there in 1999. In 2006,

her group was able to transfer a

qubit from light into a matter

w a v e a n d ba ck i n t o l i g h t u s i n g B o se - E i n s t e i n

condensates. "While the matter is traveling between the two

Bose–Einstein condensates, we can trap it, potentially for

minutes, and reshape it – change it – in whatever way we want.

This novel form of quantum control could also have applications

in the developing fields of quantum information processing andquantum cryptography."



13/35

Ursula FranklinExperimental Physicist and Metallurgist

Berkeley SPS

Ursula Franklin received her PhD in experimental physics from

Technical University of Berlin in 1948. When she realized there was

no place for someone opposed to militarism and oppression,

she looked for a way out of Germany. She became the first female

professor in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Engineering and

is an expert in materials science and metallurgy. She pioneered the

field of archaeometry, which uses modern material analysis in the

field of archaeology. Franklin contributed to the cessation of

atmospheric weapons testing.

She is an ardent feminist, pacifist, andQuaker.

Image from http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/


14/35

Maria Goeppert-MayerTheoretical Physicist

Berkeley SPS

Maria Goeppert-Mayer the

second female Nobel laureate in

physics. She and Marie Curie are

the only women to have received

the Nobel Prize in physics to this

day. She wrote her PhD thesis atthe University of Göttingen on

the two-photon absorption of an

atom; the unit for the cross

section of this is named after her.

S h e w o r k e d o n i s o t o p e

separation a t C o l u m b i a

University for the Manhattan Project, and eventually joined

Edward Teller’s group at Los Alamos. She held positions (without

pay) at Columbia and the University of Chicago, and was a senior

physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory. She developed a

mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, which won

her the 1960 Nobel Prize with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene

Wigner.

She then became a full professor at UCSD in 1960.



15/35

Helen QuinnParticle Physicist

Berkeley SPS

Helen Quinn earned her PhD from

Stanford University in 1967 and is now

a professor at SLAC. She did

postdoctoral work at DESY, the

German Synchrotron Laboratory. Sheshowed how the strong, weak, and

electromagnetic forces look very

similar in high-energy processes and

suggested the near-symmetry of the

universe, with the axion as a

consequence, a possible candidate for dark matter. With several others, Quinn showed that properties of

quarks can be used to predict aspects of the physics of hadrons, now

known as quark-hadron duality.

She was the

2000 winner of the

Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics

and

the president of

the American Physical Society in 2004.

Image from https://web.stanford.edu/


16/35

Hertha SponerParticle and Molecular Physicist

Berkeley SPS

Hertha Sponer received her PhD in1920 from the Univers i ty of

Göttingen, becoming one of the first

women to receive a PhD in physics in

Germany, as well as the right to teach

science at a German university. She

worked for a year at UC Berkeley withR. T. Birge, during which time she

helped develop what is now called the

Birge-Sponer method, a way to

calculate the dissociation energy of a

molecule in molecular spectroscopy. By 1932, she had become an

associate professor of physics and had published 20 scientific articles

in journals such as Nature and Physical Review. She was dismissed fromher position at Göttingen in 1934 when Hitler came into power, after

which time she became a professor at Oslo University and Duke

University. She was the first woman on the physics faculty at Duke

University. She remained as a professor for 32 years, and as a

professor emeritus until her death in 1968. She made contributions

to the application of quantum mechanics in molecular physics andwork on the spectra of near-ultra violet absorption.

Image from https://www.flickr.com/


17/35

Sau Lan WuParticle Physicist

Berkeley SPS

Sau Lan Wu went to Vasser for her undergraduate education on a

full scholarship, initially wanting to be a painter. However, she was

inspired by Marie Curie to do physics. She earned MA and PhD atHarvard University, and has conducted research at MIT, DESY, and

the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is now the Enrico

Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics. There, she works with

ATLAS team. Wu has made important contributions towards the

discovery of the J/psi particle, providing evidence for the strange

quark, and was a key contributor to the discovery of the gluon, for

which she won the European Physical Society High Energy and

Particle Physics Prize.

Image from http://miscellanynews.org/


18/35

Louise DolanTheoretical Particle Physicist and String Theorist

Berkeley SPS

Louise Dolan received her PhD

from MIT and became a Junior

Fellow of the Society of Fellows

at Harvard University before

joining the physics faculty of

Rockefeller University in 1979.

She co-authored the paper

"Symmetry Behavior at Finite

Temperature” in 1974, which is

now regularly cited. This paper

became a part of the foundation

of quantitative analysis of phase

transitions in the early universe

in cosmological theories and is widely recognized as a seminal

work. Her work has revolutionized string theory, and she is

considered to be an originator of the field.

In 1981, she pioneered

the uses of affine algebras in particle physics and her contributions

to string theory have included symmetries in the Type II

superstring and integrable structures in super conformal non-abelian gauge theories.

Image from http://web.wellesley.edu/


19/35

Noemie Benczer Koller Nuclear Physicist

Berkeley SPS

Noemie Bunczer Koller was the firsttenured female professor at Rutgers

University. She tried to attend Columbia

University for her undergraduate

education, but they did not accept

female applicants at the time; they

redirected her to Barnard College(affiliated with Columbia), where she

obtained her BA in two years. She went

on to acquire her PhD from Columbia.

While at Rutgers, she has been a major

member of the nuclear physics research

group, working on the tandem Van de Graaff accelerator. She also

works as a condensed-matter physicist, performing experiments using

the Mössbauer effect, by which she investigated the electronic

structure of magnetic materials. She is said to be a pioneer of several

areas of nuclear and condensed matter physics. She was the Director

of the Nuclear Physics Laboratory from 1986 to 1989. At Rutgers,

Koller served on the administration of the university as the Associate

Dean for Sciences of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1992 to1996.

Image from https://www.rci.rutgers.edu/


20/35

Sandra Faber Astrophysicist

Berkeley SPS

Sandra Faber earned her PhD

from Harvard in 1972 in Optical

Observat ional Astronomy.

Afterwards, she became the first

female staff member at Lick

Observatory at UCSC as an

ass i s tant professor . Faberobserved the re lat ionship

between the brightness and

spectra of galaxies and the

orbital speeds and motions of the

stars within them, later to be

called the Faber-Jackson relation,a major clue in how galaxies were

formed. She went on to publish "Formation of galaxies and large

scale structure with cold dark matter” in 1984, which still stands as

the current working paradigm for structure information in the

universe. In 2012 she became the Interim Director of the University

of California Observatories and is a co-editor of the Annual Reviewof Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Image from http://news.ucsc.edu/


21/35

Annie EasleyComputer Scientist, Mathematician, Rocket Scientist

Annie Easley, born in 1933, couldnot receive higher education

immediately due to her race

After reading about twin sister

who worked for NASA as

“human compute r s , ” she

acquired a similar job. While

working as a human computer

s h e a c q u i r e d a B . S . i n

mathematics from Cleveland

University. Her tuition was not

paid for by NASA, unlike that of her male colleagues. She then

ontinued her education through specialization courses offered a

NASA. Her 34-year career included developing and implementingomputer code that analyzed alternative power technologies, supported

he Centaur high-energy upper rocket stage, determined solar, wind

nd energy projects, identified energy conversion systems and

lternative systems to solve energy problems. Easley’s work with the

Centaur project helped as technological foundations for the space

huttle launches of communication, military, and weather satellitesSome say that with her contributions, modern spaceflight would no

have been possible.

Berkeley SPS

Image from http://www.engadget.com/


22/35

Nergis Mavalvala Astrophysicist

Berkeley SPS

Nergis Mavalvala, born in Pakistan, received her PhD in physics

from MIT in 1997. She is now the associate head of theDepartment of Physics at MIT, and lives in Cambridge with her

female partner and child. Mavalvala is part of the LIGO team,

which recently detected gravitational waves for the first time. She

works on laser cooling to optically cool and trap more massive

objects, for LIGO and other experiments. She has also worked on

the development of exotic quantum states of light, which greatlyimproved the sensitivity of the LIGO detector, a significant

contribution to the LIGO experiment.

Image from http://www.dawn.com/


23/35

Kalpana Chawla Astronaut

Berkeley SPS

Kalpana Chawla was the first female astronaut of Indian origin. She

received her MA in aerospace engineering from University of Texas

Arlington in 1984. Determined to become an astronaut despite therecent Challenger disaster, she went on to earn a second master and

PhD from University of Colorado, Boulder. On her first mission in

1997 aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, she was the mission

specialist and robotic arm operator, responsible for the deploying of

the Spartan satellite. She returned to space again in 2003 to conduct

microgravity experiments, and was, tragically, among the seven

astronauts who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster upon

reentry.

Image from http://alumni.colorado.edu/


24/35

Ida NoddackChemist and Physicist

Berkeley SPS

Ida Noddak attained her doctorate from the Technical University

of Berlin in 1921, and became the first woman to hold a

professional chemist’s position in chemical industry in Germany.

She was the first to mention the idea of nuclear fission in 1934,

which was later verified by Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn. Noddak,

with her husband, discovered the element Rhenium, and was

nominated for the Nobel Prize in chemistry three times.

Image from http://36.media.tumblr.com/


25/35

Lise Meitner Nuclear Physicist

Berkeley SPS

Lise Meitner was the second

woman to earn a doctoral

d e g r e e i n p h y s i c s a t

University of Vienna in

1905, after which she became

the first woman to become afull professor of physics in

Germany, working at the

University of Berlin. After

Hitler’s rise, she was forced to

flee to Sweden due to her

Jewish heritage. Meitner led a

group of scientists with Otto

Hahn in the discovery of the

nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbs an extra neutron.

Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize for this achievement, and

her exclusion has become a point of controversy. Meitner also

discovered the first long-lived isotope of protactinium, as was

referred to by Albert Einstein as a “German Marie Curie."

Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/


26/35


27/35

Naomi GinsbergOptics, Condensed Matter, and Biophysicist

UC Berkeley Physics Faculty

Berkeley SPS

Naomi S. Ginsberg received a B.A.Scdegree in Engineering Science from

the University of Toronto in 2000

and a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard

University in 2007. She held a Glenn

T. Seaborg Postdoctoral Fellowship a

Lawrence Berke ley Nat ionaLaboratory until her appointment a

Assistant Professor in the Chemistry

department at UC Berkeley in 2010

Naomi joined the Physics faculty in

2011. She currently holds the CupolaEra Endowed Chair in the College of Chemistry, is a Faculty

Scientist in the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley

National Laboratory, and is the recipient of a David and Lucile

Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2011). Naomi'

research is in the areas of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics

Biophysics, Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science. He

current projects include mapping spatio-temporal photoexcitation

trajectories onto the architecture of photosynthetic light harvesterand near-field cathodoluminescence microscopy

Image from http://physics.berkeley.edu/


28/35


29/35

Beate HeinemannExperimental Particle Physicist


Berkeley SPS

Beate Heinemann received herDiploma and PhD from the

Universi ty of Hamburg in

Germany. Afterwards, she had a

postdoctoral fellowship from the

Particle Physics and Astronomy

Research Council (PPARC) at theUniversity of Liverpool in the

United Kingdom. From she had a

PPARC Advanced Fellowship and

a fellowship from the Royal

Society at the University of

Liverpool, and in 2006 was appointed as an associate professor at UC Berkeley. She works with

the ATLAS collaboration, which conducts and analyzes data from the

ATLAS experiment, designed to take advantage of the

unprecedented energy available at the LHC and observe phenomena

that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using

earlier lower-energy accelerators with the hopes of finding physics

beyond the standard model.



30/35

Mary GaillardParticle Physicist

UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus

Berkeley SPS

Mary Gaillard received her Ph.D.

from the University of Paris in 1968

and has been a professor at Berkeley

since 1981. She was the first tenured

physics faculty member at Berkeley.

She is a fellow of the, National

Academy of Sciences and the

American Academy of Arts andSciences, winner of the E.O.

Lawrence Memorial Award, J.J.

Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle

Physics, and is a fellow of the

American Physical Society. Her important contributions include the

prediction of the mass of the charm quark prior to its discovery,prediction of 3-jet events, and prediction of the b-quark mass. She is

studying effective supergravity theories for particle physics, with the

goal of addressing the problems of supersymmetry breaking and

electroweak symmetry breaking, as well as other aspects of particle

physics and cosmology, in the context of superstring theory. She

recently authored a book titled A Singluarly Unfeminine Profession:One Woman’s Journey in Physics, in which she details her experience

as a woman in the male-dominated field.



31/35


32/35

Frances HellmanCondensed Matter Physics


Berkeley SPS

Frances Hellman received her BA inPhysics from Dartmouth College in

1978. She received her PhD in

Applied Physics from Stanford

University in 1985, studying what

were then considered the high Tc

superconductors (the A15's). After a2 year post-doc in thin film

magnetism at AT&T Bell Labs, she

went to UCSD as an assistant

professor in 1987, where she

eventually became a full professor.

She joined the Physics Department at UC Berkeley in 2005, and became Chair of the Department in

2007. She stepped down as chair after serving 6 years. Hellman has

an appointment in the UCB Materials Science and Engineering

Department as well as at LBNL in the Materials Sciences Division.

Her current research focuses on the study of thermodynamic and

temperature-dependent properties of materials.



33/35

Mina AganagicParticle Physicist


Berkeley SPS

Mina Aganagic received her BS

(1995) and PhD (1999) degrees

from California Institute of

Technology. From 1999-2003 she

had a postdoctoral appointment

at Harvard University. She was anAssistant Professor of Physics and

a n A d j u n c t P r o f e s s o r o f

Mathematics at the University of

Washington, Seattle from 2003-4.

In 2003 she was named

Outstanding Junior Investigatorby the Department of Energy,

and in 2004 she was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship. In 2004 she was appointed

Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of

California Berkeley. She was promoted to an Associate Professor in

2008, and to Professor in 2012. She is a string theorist, working at the

intersection of mathematics and physics.



34/35

Gabriel Orebi GannParticle Physicist


Berkeley SPS

Gabriel Orebi Gann attended the

University of Cambridge in the

UK from 2000 to 2004, where she

received her BA and MSci in

Natural Sciences. She went on to

the University of Oxford, and was

awarded her DPhil in Particle and

Nuclear Physics in 2008. Her post-

doctoral research was performed at

the University of Pennsylania, in

Professor Klein's research group,

working on SNO and its successor,

the SNO+ experiment. OrebiGann joined the U.C. Berkeley

faculty in 2012. She is an experimental particle physicist, with an

nterest in weakly interacting particles. Her research focuses on

neutrinos and dark matter, and her primary experimental involvement

s with the SNO+ neutrino experiment. She is also involved in the

DEAP/CLEAN dark matter program.



35/35

Marjorie ShapiroParticle Physicist


Marjorie D. Shapiro received her

Ph.D. from the University of

California, Berkeley in December

1984. She joined the Physics

Department in 1990. She was a

Presidential Young Investigatorfrom 1989-94 and is a Fellow of

the American Physical Society.

She is an experimental particle

physicist whose interests lie in

probing the most basic interactions

in nature, including questionsaddressing the processes that

generate quark and lepton masses, the determination of the size of

the Fermi constant, and the mechanism responsible for the CP

noninvariance observed in nature. She is currently a collaborator on

the Collider Detector at Fermilab and the ATLAS experiment at

CERN.


womens history sps

Documents