Affiliations
Professor Emerita of Physics and Astronomy, Ball State University
Scientist (retired), Argonne National Laboratory
About the authors
Ruth H Howes is Professor Emerita of Physics and Astronomy at Ball State University. She
holds a PhD from Columbia University where she did her dissertation work under the
direction of C S Wu. She retired from Ball State as the George and Frances Ball
Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy in 2003 and served as Professor of
Physics and Chair of the Physics Department at Marquette University until 2008 when she
moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has held a Foster Fellowship at the US Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency where she worked on verification and intelligence and a AAAS
Congressional Fellowship during which she worked on the staff of the Senate Labor and
Human Resources Committee then chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy. She has served as
president of the American Association of Physics Teachers and the Indiana Academy of
Science and as a program officer at the National Science Foundation. Her primary research
has been in nuclear physics, lately the structure of very neutron-rich isotopes of light
elements. She also worked as deputy chair of the National Task Force on Undergraduate
Physics and as one of two project directors of the Strategic Programs for Innovation in
Undergraduate Physics and the workshops that followed beginning after her retirement. She
is a fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Physical Society
and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Caroline Herzenberg is a physicist who has achieved recognition for her activities
relating to women in science as well as for her scientific work.
Born in New Jersey in 1932, she grew up in Oklahoma. As a high-school senior in Oklahoma
City, she became a winner of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. She graduated from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an SB in physics. For graduate study she
attended the University of Chicago, where she worked in experimental physics under the
guidance of her thesis advisor, Dr Samuel K Allison, and was awarded a PhD in 1958.
She has conducted both basic and applied research and worked in diverse areas including
low-energy nuclear physics, Mossbauer spectrometry, instrumentation development, arms
control, and technological emergency preparedness; and she was a principal investigator
for returned lunar sample analysis for the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 missions.
She has taught on the faculties of several universities, including Illinois Institute of
Technology, the University of Illinois at the Medical Center, and California State
University, Fresno. She was a senior scientist on the staff of IIT Research Institute, and
worked as a physicist on the staff of Argonne National Laboratory until her retirement.
Dr Herzenberg is the author or co-author of more than 100 scientific and technical papers
and chapters and article in books, and is co-author with Ruth Howes of the book Their Day
in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project and author of the book Women Scientists from
Antiquity to the Present. She is a past president of the Association for Women in Science,
and a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.
