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Category: Department News
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Published: Wednesday, May 15 2013 01:00
There will be two new additions to the department: Katharine B. Gebbie and Gloria Lubkin. Both will hold the title of Visiting Senior Research Scholar.
Katharine Gebbie has just retired as the Director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology after a truly stellar career. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a degree in physics and subsequently received a bachelor’s degree in astronomy and a Ph.D. in physics from University College London.
She arrived at NIST (then known as the National Bureau of Standards) in 1968, working in areas including nebulae, atomic spectra and supergranular velocity fields. In addition to her scientific acumen, she has demonstrated administrative prowess and an unflinching determination to provide scientists the freedom and resources to do great things. The results are truly impressive: in 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2012, NIST physicists were winners of the Nobel Prize.
Much credit goes to Katharine for nurturing JILA into a first rate institute, in playing a huge role in building the NIST Advanced Measurement Lab (AML), a precursor to our own PSC, and in initiating and supporting the Joint Quantum Institute, the terrifically successful NIST-UMD partnership that is illuminating many areas of atomic, molecular and optical physics and the ever-fascinating world of quantum information.
Gloria Lubkin has enjoyed a truly remarkable career as a science journalist and historian, notably as the longtime editor of Physics Today. She holds degrees in physics from Temple University and Boston University, and worked as a mathematician and physicist in the private sector before joining the physics department at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1963, she started as an associate editor of Physics Today. She retired as Editor Emerita in 2009.
Gloria is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was awarded a Nieman journalism fellowship at Harvard University in 1974-75, and has served on the selection committee for MIT’s Knight Science Writing Fellowships. She is a founding member of the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics and has held several key posts on the APS’ History of Physics forum. The Gloria Becker Lubkin Professorship of Theoretical Physics was established in her honor at the University of Minnesota in 1990. Gloria has truly had a ringside seat for much of the developments in physics since the 1960s, is a wealth of information and perspective, and will be working on a book.
We are grateful and honored that Katharine and Gloria have accepted appointments with us. Having two people with such a wealth of knowledge and perspective is an incredibly wonderful opportunity.