Fay Ajzenberg-Selove

Born on 13 February 1926 in Berlin, Fay Ajzenberg-Selove was a nuclear physicist and advocate for women in science who was awarded the US National Medal of Science. Due to the advance of Nazi Germany across Europe, she spent parts of her childhood in France, Spain, Portugal, and Cuba before her family finally settled in New York City. She earned a BS in engineering physics from the University of Michigan and a PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1952. Soon after she moved to Caltech, where she became the first woman appointed to the physics department, to review experimental work on the structure of light nuclei. Over the years Ajzenberg-Selove would analyze thousands of papers and publish 26 reviews, most of them written alone. She also conducted nuclear spectroscopy experiments of her own. In 1957 Ajzenberg-Selove became the first tenured woman faculty member at Haverford College. She then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where she became a full tenured professor in 1973; she had to appeal to government equal opportunity commissions after her deserving application was initially rejected. Ajzenberg-Selove was active in supporting women in science and academia. In 1971 she organized a panel on women in physics at a meeting of the American Physical Society, which led to the founding of the APS Committee on the Status of Women in Physics . In 2007 President George W. Bush presented Ajzenberg-Selove with the National Medal of Science. She died in 2012 at age 86. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 13 February 1926