Alice Armstrong

Alice H. Armstrong was an American physicist known as one of the first female scientists at the National Bureau of Standards and as the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University, via Radcliffe College. She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1931.

Early life and education Alice Armstrong was born on December 8, 1897. Armstrong grew up in Waltham, Massachusetts and attended a two-room country schoolhouse until she entered Waltham High School, where she studied Latin, German and French. Her mother hoped that she would attend Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, but she chose Wellesley College instead after visiting there with a friend. At Wellesley, she originally intended to major in French and German, but she took a physics course on the advice of her older half-brother, an engineer, and she went on to earn a degree in physics with a minor in chemistry. Armstrong graduated from Wellesley in 1919.

Graduate studies alt=black and white photograph of a brick and stone laboratory building. a large tree stands in front of the building, with a bicycle leaned up against the tree Armstrong worked at this building at the National Bureau of Standards, which was devoted entirely to the work in Electricity, Photometry, Radium, X-Ray, and Radio Communication. Armstrong developed an interest in radioactivity during her time at Wellesley. After graduating in 1919, she took a job at the National Bureau of Standards. She began work checking radium-dial watches used by the army, and then transferred to the radium section as an assistant physicist. The Bureau's radium laboratory had the responsibility of checking the quality and amount of radium samples, and the lab director was frequently absent due to a stomach ulcer. "So," Armstrong later recalled, "after only a few months, I found myself more or less in charge of certifying all the radium sold in the United States."

While working with Duane on her graduate studies, a laboratory accident exposed Armstrong to half a lethal dose of x-ray radiation. Armstrong fell ill for a year and a half. and then from 1927 to 1929 she worked at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research as a research assistant in biophysics.

In 1929 Armstrong returned to Harvard and continued her work on x-rays as well as working for the Harvard Cancer Commission at Huntington Hospital in Boston. She was appointed an Assistant Group Leader in the Physics Division in 1957.

Following her retirement from Los Alamos in 1964, Armstrong worked at the Vela Satellite Program. She studied the flux and energy of protons in the lower Van Allen radiation belt.

Armstrong died on January 22, 1989.