Elsa van Dien

Elsa van Dien (12 July 1914 – 15 October 2007) was an astronomer. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She married Gale Bruno van Albada who was also an astronomer.

Biography Elsa van Dien was born in Paramaribo (Surinam) on 12 July 1914. She was the daughter of Rebecca da Silva and Gerrit van Dien. The family moved to the Netherlands in 1923. Van Dien began studying astronomy at the University of Amsterdam in 1932. She also registered at the University of Leiden (The Netherlands) in 1935, to have access to its observatory. She was later encouraged to obtain her doctorate at Harvard University.

After her PhD, she initially stayed at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, Canada. In 1948 she moved back to the Netherlands. In August 1948 she was appointed at the Bosscha Observatory near Bandung, Indonesia; where she aided in the rehabilitation of the Observatory, along with the creation of their Schmidt telescope. The Observatory suffered serious damage in the aftermath of a military occupation. There she met and married Gale Bruno van Albada, who took interest in the telescope project. She continued her astronomical research until 1958, when the family returned to the Netherlands. She edited the Dutch journal Wetenschap en Samenleving from 1965 to 1972. In the 1970s and 1980, after the death of Van Albada in 1972, she once again resumed her astronomical research.