Melba Phillips

Born on 1 February 1907 in Hazelton, Indiana, Melba Phillips was a physicist and leading science educator. Phillips graduated from high school at age 15. She received a BA in math from Indiana’s Oakland City College in 1926, an MA in physics from Michigan’s Battle Creek College in 1928, and a PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1933. One of the first doctoral students of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Phillips worked with him to develop the Oppenheimer–Phillips process in 1935 to explain a type of nuclear reaction involving a deuteron. After finishing her studies, Phillips worked several temporary jobs before landing her first permanent position at Brooklyn College in 1938. Phillips was fired from that position in 1952, however, when she refused to testify against friends and colleagues before a US Senate subcommittee investigating alleged communist activities. Unemployed for the next five years, Phillips wrote two textbooks, Classical Electricity and Magnetism (1955) with Wolfgang Panofsky and Principles of Physical Science (1957) with Francis Bonner. In 1957 she became associate director of the Academic Year Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. She joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1962, where she would remain for the next decade. From 1966 to 1967 she served as the first woman president of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). After retiring in 1972, she worked as a visiting professor at SUNY Stony Brook until 1975 and at the graduate school of the Chinese Academy of Science’s University of Science and Technology in Beijing in 1980. Among the many honors and awards she received was AAPT’s first Melba Newell Phillips Medal, created in her honor in 1981. She was also a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She died in 2004 at age 97. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 1 February 1907