Gertrude Goldhaber

Born on 14 July 1911 in Mannheim, Germany, Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber was a nuclear physicist and the first woman PhD hired by Brookhaven National Laboratory. She earned a PhD from the University of Munich and later emigrated to the US after marrying Maurice Goldhaber, a physics professor at the University of Illinois. In 1942 Gertrude made the top-secret discovery of a link between spontaneous fission and the emission of neutrons. In 1950 Gertrude and Maurice moved to Brookhaven. There Gertrude made a series of important measurements of nuclear structure across the periodic table. In 1972 she became the third woman physicist elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She was active in American Physical Society and National Research Council committees dedicated to women in science. She died in 1998 at age 86. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 14 July 1911