March is…

The Society of Physics Students has created posters honoring female physicists, both modern and historical. The women we’ve featured are only a small 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 many more!

Berkeley SPS Shirley Ann Jackson Nuclear Physicist

Shirley Ann Jackson was the second African 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 has performed 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 the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she has helped raise over $1 billion for philanthropic causes.

Image from http://ethix.org/

Berkeley SPS 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 Radiation Laboratory, now Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. After moving to the East Coast, and working for both Princeton and Smith, she joined the Manhattan Project’s Substitute Alloy Materials Lab, where she helped develop a process to enrich uranium ore that produced large quantities of fuel for the bomb. After the war, she became an associate research professor at Columbia, and her research 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 to receive an honorary doctorate from Princeton and be elected to the American Physical Society. She was also a recipient of the National Medal of Science.

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

Berkeley SPS Mae Jemison Astronaut

Mae Jemison was the first African American female astronaut. She graduated from Stanford 1977 with a degree in chemical engineering and went onto Cornell Medical College. After working at 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/

Berkeley SPS Katherine Johnson Mathematician

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 at West 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” to return 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 establish confidence in the new machines. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

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

Berkeley SPS Maryam Mirzakhani Mathematician

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 her contributions 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/

Berkeley SPS Vera Rubin Astrophysicist

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 the motion of galaxies, and received her PhD from Georgetown University, where her thesis concluded that galaxies clumped 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/

Berkeley SPS Lene Hau Particle Physicist and Applied Physicist

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 wave and back into light using Bose-Einstein 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 and quantum cryptography."

Image from https://en.wikipedia.org

Berkeley SPS Maria Goeppert-Mayer Theoretical Physicist

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 at the University of Göttingen on the two-photon absorption of an atom; the unit for the cross section of this is named after her. She worked on isotope 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.

Image from https://en.wikipedia.org

Berkeley SPS Helen Quinn Particle Physicist

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. She showed 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/

Berkeley SPS Sau Lan Wu Particle Physicist

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 at Harvard 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/

Berkeley SPS Noemie Benczer Koller Nuclear Physicist

Noemie Bunczer Koller was the first tenured 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 to 1996.

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

Berkeley SPS Annie Easley Computer Scientist, Mathematician, Rocket Scientist

Annie Easley, born in 1933, could not receive higher education immediately due to her race. After reading about twin sisters who worked for NASA as “human computers,” she acquired a similar job. While working as a human computer, she acquired a B.S. in mathematics from Cleveland University. Her tuition was not paid for by NASA, unlike that of her male colleagues. She then continued her education through specialization courses offered at NASA. Her 34-year career included developing and implementing computer code that analyzed alternative power technologies, supported the Centaur high-energy upper rocket stage, determined solar, wind and energy projects, identified energy conversion systems and alternative systems to solve energy problems. Easley’s work with the Centaur project helped as technological foundations for the space shuttle launches of communication, military, and weather satellites. Some say that with her contributions, modern spaceflight would not have been possible.

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

Berkeley SPS Kalpana Chawla Astronaut

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 the recent 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/

Berkeley SPS Lise Meitner Nuclear Physicist

Lise Meitner was the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics at University of Vienna in 1905, after which she became the first woman to become a full 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/

Berkeley SPS Jocelyn Bell Burnell Astrophysicist

Jocelyn Bell Burnell received her PhD from Cambridge in 1969, and went on to work for several top universities in the UK, and is now a visiting professor of astrophysics at Oxford. While doing her graduate research at Cambridge, she helped construct the radio telescope for using interplanetary scintillation to study quasars. Using this telescope, under her thesis advisor, Antony Hewish, she discovered the first radio pulsars, which Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize for, a point of controversy in the astrophysics community. At the 1970 International Astronomical Union’s General Assembly, Dr. Iosif Shlovsky, recipient of the 1972 Bruce Medal, sought out Bell to tell her: "Miss Bell, you have made the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century.”

Image from http://www.bbc.co.uk/

Berkeley SPS Naomi Ginsberg Optics, Condensed Matter, and Biophysicist UC Berkeley Physics Faculty

Naomi S. Ginsberg received a B.A.Sc. degree 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 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory until her appointment as Assistant Professor in the Chemistry department at UC Berkeley in 2010. Naomi joined the Physics faculty in 2011. She currently holds the Cupola Era 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's research is in the areas of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, Biophysics, Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science. Her current projects include mapping spatio-temporal photoexcitation trajectories onto the architecture of photosynthetic light harvesters and near-field cathodoluminescence microscopy

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

Berkeley SPS Alessandra Lanzara Condensed Matter and Materials Science Physicist UC Berkeley Physics Faculty

Alessandra Lanzara received her PhD in physics from Universita’ di Roma La Sapienza, Italy in 1999. She was a post-doc at Stanford University for three years since 1999. In 2002 she joined the physics Department faculty at UC Berkeley as Assistant Professor and since 2011 she is a Full Professor. She is also a Faculty Scientist at the Materials Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2002. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2008. Her group’s research interests focus toward an understanding of the underlying physics in complex novel materials and nanostructures, where the conventional picture for an electron does not hold anymore and the electrons are now dressed by the different degrees of freedom

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

Berkeley SPS Beate Heinemann Experimental Particle Physicist UC Berkeley Physics Faculty

Beate Heinemann received her Diploma and PhD from the University of Hamburg in Germany. Afterwards, she had a postdoctoral fellowship from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) at the University 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.

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

Berkeley SPS Mary Gaillard Particle Physicist UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus

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 and Sciences, 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.

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

Berkeley SPS Barbara Jacak Nuclear and Particle Physicist UC Berkeley Physics Faculty

Barbara Jacak has been named as Berkeley Lab’s new director of the Nuclear Science Division and has also accepted a joint appointment as Faculty Senior Scientist at Berkeley Lab and Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. Jacak is one the leaders of the nuclear physics community in the United States. She did her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley, and her PhD at Michigan State University. After graduating, she received an Oppenheimer Fellowship. at Los Alamos National Laboratory and remained on the staff there until January 1997 when she joined the faculty at SUNY, Stony Brook as Professor of Physics. Her research focuses on experimental study of quark gluon plasma; this plasma is formed in relativistic heavy ion collisions where nuclei are heated to trillions of degrees and quarks are no longer confined in hadrons. The experiments are done at Brookhaven National Lab’s RHIC and at CERN

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

Berkeley SPS Marjorie Shapiro Particle Physicist UC Berkeley Physics Faculty

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 Investigator from 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 questions addressing 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.

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

Berkeley SPS