Esther Conwell

Today is the birthday of chemist and physicist Esther Conwell, born in New York City in 1922. She majored in physics at Brooklyn College. After her first semester at graduate school she got hired at Western Electric as an assistant engineer. Several weeks after starting the job, she was informed that the payroll department did not have a classification for female assistant engineer, so her title was changed and salary reduced. In March 1943 she began work on her master’s thesis on the movement of electrons through semiconductors, such as germanium and silicon. She finished the thesis by June, when her advisor had to leave for Los Alamos for the war effort. That theoretical work set the foundation for transistors and the modern era of semiconductor computers. Conwell also studied the movement of hot electrons, which become energetic due to high electric fields. She worked at Bell Labs, GTE Laboratories, and Xerox before becoming a professor at the University of Rochester. In her later years she studied the movement of electrical charge through DNA. Among many awards, she received the National Medal of Science in 2010. (Image credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Date in History: 23 May 1922