Fay Ajzenberg-Selove
Encyclopedia
Fay Ajzenberg-Selove is a German-American physicist. She was a recipient of the 2007 National Medal of Science
.
who studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Music. In 1919, they fled the Russian Revolution and settled in Germany, where her father became a wealthy investment banker. They were bankrupted by the Great Depression
, so the family moved to France
and her father worked as a chemical engineer in a sugar beet
factory in Lieusaint, France owned by her uncle Isaac Naiditch. Ajzenberg attended the Lycée Victor Duruy and Le Collège Sévigné
. In 1940, the family fled Paris prior to the Nazi invasion of France
. They took a torturous route through Spain
, Portugal
, the Dominican Republic
, and Cuba
before they settled in New York City
in April 1941.
Ajzenberg graduated from Julia Richman High School
in 1943. She attended the University of Michigan
and graduated in 1946 with a BS in engineering and the only woman in a class of 100. After briefly doing graduate work at Columbia University
and teaching at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier, she began doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
. In graduate school she found a method of creating 6Li
targets by converting the sulphate to a chloride
and electroplating
it to the target. She also demonstrated that the excited state
s of the 10B
nucleus were not evenly spaced as previously thought. She graduated in 1952 with a PhD in physics.
. Together they would publish Energy Levels of Light Nuclei, a compilation of the field's best yearly research regarding nuclear structure and decay of nuclei with an atomic number
of 20 or less. Since 1973 Ajzenberg published them herself. Eventually Ajzenberg would publish 26 of these papers, primarily in the journal Nuclear Physics
, until 1990. They have been called "the nuclear scientists' bible."
Following graduation, Ajzenberg was a lecturer at Smith College
and a visiting fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
. She was hired as an assistant professor of physics at Boston University
, but the dean lowered her salary 15 percent when he learned Ajzenberg was a woman. Ajzenberg refused the position until the initial salary was restored.
While at Boston College, she met Harvard University
physicist Walter Selove and they married in December 1955. In 1962, using the bubble chamber
at the Brookhaven National Laboratory
, he discovered a meson
he named the fayon (f2) after her. He died in 2010.
In the 1960s, she worked at Haverford College
, where she was the first full-time female faculty member. In 1970, Ajzenberg-Selove began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania
, where Selove had taught since 1957. In 1972, she applied for one of three tenure
d positions there. She was not hired; the reasons cited were age and "inadequate research publications". Ajzenberg-Selove was only 46, had a citation count
higher than everyone in the physics department except for Nobel
laureate J. Robert Schrieffer, and was Nuclear Physics Section chair of the American Physical Society
. She filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and in 1973 the University of Pennsylvania was ordered to give her a tenured professorship. She became only the second female professor in the university's School of Arts and Sciences.
National Medal of Science
The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social sciences, biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and...
.
Early life
She was born Fay Ajzenberg in Berlin, Germany to a Jewish family from Russia. Her father, Mojzesz Ajzenberg, was a mining engineer who studied at the St. Petersburg School of Mines and her mother, Olga Naiditch Ajzenberg, was a pianist and mezzo-sopranoMezzo-soprano
A mezzo-soprano is a type of classical female singing voice whose range lies between the soprano and the contralto singing voices, usually extending from the A below middle C to the A two octaves above...
who studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Music. In 1919, they fled the Russian Revolution and settled in Germany, where her father became a wealthy investment banker. They were bankrupted by the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, so the family moved to France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and her father worked as a chemical engineer in a sugar beet
Sugar beet
Sugar beet, a cultivated plant of Beta vulgaris, is a plant whose tuber contains a high concentration of sucrose. It is grown commercially for sugar production. Sugar beets and other B...
factory in Lieusaint, France owned by her uncle Isaac Naiditch. Ajzenberg attended the Lycée Victor Duruy and Le Collège Sévigné
Collège Sévigné
The Collège Sévigné is a French non-denominational private school.It is ranked 2nd in the city and 19th in the country by a french weekly magazine....
. In 1940, the family fled Paris prior to the Nazi invasion of France
Battle of France
In the Second World War, the Battle of France was the German invasion of France and the Low Countries, beginning on 10 May 1940, which ended the Phoney War. The battle consisted of two main operations. In the first, Fall Gelb , German armoured units pushed through the Ardennes, to cut off and...
. They took a torturous route through Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
, the Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...
, and Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
before they settled in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in April 1941.
Ajzenberg graduated from Julia Richman High School
Julia Richman High School
Julia Richman High School is a defunct comprehensive high school in Manhattan, New York.Built in 1923 and located at East 67th Street and Second Avenue, the building was the only public high school in the Upper East Side of New York. The school is named after Julia Richman, the first woman...
in 1943. She attended the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
and graduated in 1946 with a BS in engineering and the only woman in a class of 100. After briefly doing graduate work at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
and teaching at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier, she began doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
. In graduate school she found a method of creating 6Li
Lithium
Lithium is a soft, silver-white metal that belongs to the alkali metal group of chemical elements. It is represented by the symbol Li, and it has the atomic number 3. Under standard conditions it is the lightest metal and the least dense solid element. Like all alkali metals, lithium is highly...
targets by converting the sulphate to a chloride
Chloride
The chloride ion is formed when the element chlorine, a halogen, picks up one electron to form an anion Cl−. The salts of hydrochloric acid HCl contain chloride ions and can also be called chlorides. The chloride ion, and its salts such as sodium chloride, are very soluble in water...
and electroplating
Electroplating
Electroplating is a plating process in which metal ions in a solution are moved by an electric field to coat an electrode. The process uses electrical current to reduce cations of a desired material from a solution and coat a conductive object with a thin layer of the material, such as a metal...
it to the target. She also demonstrated that the excited state
Excited state
Excitation is an elevation in energy level above an arbitrary baseline energy state. In physics there is a specific technical definition for energy level which is often associated with an atom being excited to an excited state....
s of the 10B
Boron
Boron is the chemical element with atomic number 5 and the chemical symbol B. Boron is a metalloid. Because boron is not produced by stellar nucleosynthesis, it is a low-abundance element in both the solar system and the Earth's crust. However, boron is concentrated on Earth by the...
nucleus were not evenly spaced as previously thought. She graduated in 1952 with a PhD in physics.
Physics career
She did postdoctoral work with Thomas Lauritsen at the California Institute of TechnologyCalifornia Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
. Together they would publish Energy Levels of Light Nuclei, a compilation of the field's best yearly research regarding nuclear structure and decay of nuclei with an atomic number
Atomic number
In chemistry and physics, the atomic number is the number of protons found in the nucleus of an atom and therefore identical to the charge number of the nucleus. It is conventionally represented by the symbol Z. The atomic number uniquely identifies a chemical element...
of 20 or less. Since 1973 Ajzenberg published them herself. Eventually Ajzenberg would publish 26 of these papers, primarily in the journal Nuclear Physics
Nuclear Physics (journal)
Nuclear Physics is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Elsevier. The journal was founded in 1956, and then split into Nuclear Physics A and Nuclear Physics B in 1967...
, until 1990. They have been called "the nuclear scientists' bible."
Following graduation, Ajzenberg was a lecturer at Smith College
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
and a visiting fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
. She was hired as an assistant professor of physics at Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
, but the dean lowered her salary 15 percent when he learned Ajzenberg was a woman. Ajzenberg refused the position until the initial salary was restored.
While at Boston College, she met Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
physicist Walter Selove and they married in December 1955. In 1962, using the bubble chamber
Bubble chamber
A bubble chamber is a vessel filled with a superheated transparent liquid used to detect electrically charged particles moving through it. It was invented in 1952 by Donald A. Glaser, for which he was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics...
at the Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory , is a United States national laboratory located in Upton, New York on Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base...
, he discovered a meson
Meson
In particle physics, mesons are subatomic particles composed of one quark and one antiquark, bound together by the strong interaction. Because mesons are composed of sub-particles, they have a physical size, with a radius roughly one femtometer: 10−15 m, which is about the size of a proton...
he named the fayon (f2) after her. He died in 2010.
In the 1960s, she worked at Haverford College
Haverford College
Haverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States, a suburb of Philadelphia...
, where she was the first full-time female faculty member. In 1970, Ajzenberg-Selove began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, where Selove had taught since 1957. In 1972, she applied for one of three tenure
Tenure
Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...
d positions there. She was not hired; the reasons cited were age and "inadequate research publications". Ajzenberg-Selove was only 46, had a citation count
Citation impact
Citation is the process of acknowledging or citing the author, year, title, and locus of publication of a source used in a published work. Such citations can be counted as measures of the usage and impact of the cited work. This is called citation analysis or bibliometrics...
higher than everyone in the physics department except for Nobel
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
laureate J. Robert Schrieffer, and was Nuclear Physics Section chair of the American Physical Society
American Physical Society
The American Physical Society is the world's second largest organization of physicists, behind the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The Society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the world renowned Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than 20...
. She filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is an independent federal law enforcement agency that enforces laws against workplace discrimination. The EEOC investigates discrimination complaints based on an individual's race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, perceived intelligence,...
and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and in 1973 the University of Pennsylvania was ordered to give her a tenured professorship. She became only the second female professor in the university's School of Arts and Sciences.