Elly Schwab-Agallidis

Elly Schwab-Agallidis (born Elly Agallidis, , ; – ) was a Greek physicist/physical chemist and one of the first women in Greece to be awarded a PhD in the field. She was the wife of Georg-Maria Schwab, who met her at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München as the supervisor of the experimental work for her doctoral thesis; the couple then worked together as researchers at the Kanellopoulos Institute of Chemistry and Agriculture after they immigrated to Greece. Her most famous work concerned the properties and reactivity of parahydrogen. It was there that she met Georg-Maria Schwab, her future husband, who suggested that she examine parahydrogen and supervised her experimental work.

Schwab was banned from teaching in Nazi Germany due to his half-Jewish origin. With the increasing fear of prosecution, he decided in 1930 to immigrate to Elly's homeland, Greece. Agallidis and Schwab married in Athens the same year. Schwab-Agallidis was able to find work for both in the chemical laboratory of the Kanellopoulos Institute of Chemistry and Agriculture, where the couple collaborated on various topics of physico-chemical research for the next ten years (1939–1949). Among those topics Schwab-Agallidis continued her work on the properties of parahydrogen, for which she received her PhD by the Department of Physics of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 1939 and published multiple relevant papers in the following years. At the same period she also delivered lectures on Physical Chemistry at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

After a difficult period for the couple during the Axis occupation of Greece and the resumption of their research after the liberation of Greece, the two scientists eventually returned to West Germany when Schwab was offered the Professorship of Physical Chemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1951.

Elly Schwab-Agallidis died in Essen at the age of 92 in 2006.