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.