Howes, Ruth (Ruth Hege), author.
After the war : women in physics in the United States / Ruth H Howes, Caroline L Herzenberg.
This book examines the lives and contributions of American women physicists who were active in the years following World War II, during the middle decades of the 20th century. It covers the strategies they used to survive and thrive in a time where their gender was against them. The percentage of woman taking PhDs in physics has risen from 6% in 1983 to 20% in 2012 (an all-time high for women). By understanding the history of women in physics, these gains can continue. It discusses two major classes of women physicists; those who worked on military projects, and those who worked in industrial laboratories and at universities largely in the late 1940s and 1950s. While it includes minimal discussion of physics and physicists in the 1960s and later, this book focuses on the challenges and successes of women physicists in the years immediately following World War II and before the eras of affirmative actions and the use of the personal computer.
Ruth H Howes is Professor Emerita of Physics and Astronomy at Ball State University. She holds a PhD from Columbia University where she did her dissertation work under the direction of C S Wu. She retired from Ball State as the George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy in 2003 and served as Professor of Physics and Chair of the Physics Department at Marquette University until 2008 when she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has held a Foster Fellowship at the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency where she worked on verification and intelligence and a AAAS Congressional Fellowship during which she worked on the staff of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee then chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy. She has served as president of the American Association of Physics Teachers and the Indiana Academy of Science and as a program officer at the National Science Foundation. Her primary research has been in nuclear physics, lately the structure of very neutron-rich isotopes of light elements. She also worked as deputy chair of the National Task Force on Undergraduate Physics and as one of two project directors of the Strategic Programs for Innovation in Undergraduate Physics and the workshops that followed beginning after her retirement. She is a fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Caroline Herzenberg is a physicist who has achieved recognition for her activities relating to women in science as well as for her scientific work. Born in New Jersey in 1932, she grew up in Oklahoma. As a high-school senior in Oklahoma City, she became a winner of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. She graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an SB in physics. For graduate study she attended the University of Chicago, where she worked in experimental physics under the guidance of her thesis advisor, Dr. Samuel K Allison, and was awarded a PhD in 1958. She has conducted both basic and applied research and worked in diverse areas including low-energy nuclear physics, Mossbauer spectrometry, instrumentation development, arms control, and technological emergency preparedness; and she was a principal investigator for returned lunar sample analysis for the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 missions. She has taught on the faculties of several universities, including Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at the Medical Center, and California State University, Fresno. She was a senior scientist on the staff of IIT Research Institute, and worked as a physicist on the staff of Argonne National Laboratory until her retirement.. Dr. Herzenberg is the author or co-author of more than 100 scientific and technical papers and chapters and article in books, and is co-author with Ruth Howes of the book Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project and author of the book Women Scientists from Antiquity to the Present. She is a past president of the Association for Women in Science, and a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Women physicists -- United States -- Biography.
Physicists -- United States -- Biography.
Physics bisacsh
Herzenberg, Caroline L., 1932- author.