Women of AMO Physics

Posted on by Chad Orzel

Via Steinn, a “meme” asking people to name women in science:

Rules:
1. You can’t choose people from your own institution or company.
2. You can’t google or use the internet to aid in your search. (But if you know someone is a scientist, but not sure what disciple, you can look that up).
3. You can consult textbooks, journals, and class notes.
4. You can ask others to help you brainstorm, but they can’t use the internet just to get 5 names fast (see #2).
5. Living and deceased scientists are acceptable.
6. Links to or references about the named scientists are greatly appreciated. Let’s share the knowledge.

This is difficult only because I’m horrible with names. In my subfield of physics, I immediately come up with:

  • Others that come to mind: Jennifer Sebby-Strabley, Lori Goldner, Laura Ratliff, Simone Kulin, Natalie Westbrook, Kazuko Shimizu, Katharine Gebbie, Irina Novikova.

    This would be easier if I didn’t have to spend five minutes per name going “Oh, God, what’s her name, the one who did the thing with the pulsed lasers. She works with that guy, who did the other thing, and what’s his name…?” I hate my brain in the mornings.

    • 10 thoughts on “Women of AMO Physics”

    1. This would also be easier if the last DAMOP wasn’t in Canada. Ugh.

      I don’t guess “the woman who runs the theory center at Harvard” or “what’s-her-name who was the most cited person at U Colorado” would count.

    2. I don’t get to use two of your five. Rats.

      How about M. A. Bouchiat? She’s one of the early searchers for electric dipole moments in atomic systems. She spent many decades working with cesium vapor cells.

      We should name an AMO theorist, too: Ulyana I. Safronova.

      While we’re at Notre Dame, how about Carol Tanner?
      (I was having the same problem that Chad was remembering these two names.)

      I guess I don’t get to count Lisa Lapidus with whom I went to grad school. She’s gone over to the dark side of biophysics.

      Since Chad didn’t give Irina Novikova a link, I will.

      I’ll just add one more name of someone who came through relatively recently: Tanya Zelevinsky.

    3. Oh yeah, even though I don’t get to count her in my list of five, as her office is but two floors above mine, let me say that “the woman who runs the theory center at Harvard” is Kate Kirby.

    4. Joan Roughgarden (though her earlier experiences in science may invalidate her for this meme): Biologist
      http://www.stanford.edu/group/roughlab/rough.html

      Laura Landweber: Biologist
      http://www.princeton.edu/~lfl/

      Megumi … forgot her last name– she does great work in Symplectic Geometry & it’s pretty darn close to physics(Found her last name when I looked up her webpage)
      http://www.math.mcmaster.ca/~haradam/

      Sally Otto: Biologist
      http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~otto/

      Suzy Renn: Biologist
      http://academic.reed.edu/biology/professors/srenn/

      Ah just saw the deceased part…
      Madame Curie (of course), Emily Noether (Another mathematicians.. but she created some of the most BEAUTIFUL theorems ever! and they’re closely tied to physics)

      (I’d like to include Amy D and Heather W both recent PhDs in Oregon, but they’re both private people and family so that probably violates the spirit of the rules)

      And.. like yourself… there’s a bunch of people I can only half identify.

    6. Dude! You WERE thinking about this one: Maria Goeppert-Mayer.

      Girlfriend did get the Nobel Prize for the nuclear model of shell structure, but she made several distinctive contributions to AMO physics:

      First calculation of a two-photon process in atoms – as I recall, decay of the 2s state of hydrogen by two-photon emission

      First quantitative explanation of the lanthanide contraction, which shows why all the rare-earth elements are chemically similar

      First quantitative explanation of the quantum defects of non-penetrating Rydberg states, in terms of the polarization of the residual ion core. This may seem to some to be highly specialized, but the idea lies at the foundation of quantitative assessment of the ionization potentials of highly-charged ions

    7. A few who have turned up in my blog or my reading are these:

      – Susan Pepperberg, researcher into parrot intelligence and trainer of Alex

      – the late Rosalind Franklin, X-ray crystallographer whose data, unbeknownst to her, contributed to the discoverery of DNA’s structure

      – Dean Scott, who lead the team that created a computer 3D endocast of the H. floresiensis brain

      – the late Anne McLaren, developmental biologist and Fellow of the Royal Society (their first female officer in 300 years)

      – Rosemary Grant, who with Peter Grant elucidated the details of finch evolution by natural selection tracked from season to season.

    8. Sorry, that should have been Dean Falk! So as not to link to my own blog, here’s an article on Anthropology.net.

      And I ought to mention my step-daughter, who is in the process of getting her PhD in biology and has already out-produced the entire Intelligent Design movement with three actual research papers (one in astronomy, two in biology) and a poster session.

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