Edith Elizabeth Farkas

Edith Elizabeth Farkas (13 October 1921 – 3 February 1993) was a New Zealand Antarctic researcher, best known for being the first Hungarian woman and also the first New Zealand MetService female staff member to set foot in Antarctica. In addition she conducted world-leading ozone monitoring research for over 30 years. with a degree as a mathematics and physics teacher from Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest. She emigrated to New Zealand as a refugee in 1949, after the war, where she completed a MSc Degree in Physics in 1952 at Victoria University of Wellington. She started working as a meteorologist in the Research Section of the New Zealand Meteorological Service in 1951 where she continued to do so for some 35 years.

Farkas monitored ozone from the 1950s until her retirement in 1986, undertaking world-leading research in the field of ozone monitoring over more than three decades. During 1960s her work shifted increasingly to the study of atmospheric ozone including the measurement of total ozone with the Dobson ozone spectrophotometer. Her work contributed substantially towards the discovery of the "hole in the ozone layer" which changed the world's behavior towards pollution forever. Her interest in atmospheric ozone measurement led naturally to the application of her expertise to the monitoring of surface ozone as part of air pollution studies and also to the measurement of atmospheric turbidity. She received special recognition at the Quadrennial Ozone Symposium in Germany in 1988 for her 30-year contribution to Ozone research.