Gabrielle Donnay

Gabrielle Donnay, née Hamburger (21 March 1920 – 4 April 1987), was a German-born American crystallographer and historian of science.

Life Gabrielle Donnay was born in Landeshut, Germany (now Kamienna Góra, Poland) on 21 March 1920 and emigrated to the United States in 1937. She received her B.A. from UCLA in chemistry in 1941 and was awarded her Ph.D in 1949 from MIT. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in 1949–1950. In 1949, she met and married Joseph (Jose) Donnay, a professor of crystallography and mineralogy at Johns Hopkins University. In 1950, she joined the staff of the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where she worked until 1969. She died on 4 April 1987 near Mont St-Hilaire, Quebec. led to 13 more papers on the same topic, including a definitive 1977 paper on the structural mechanism of pyroelectricity in tourmaline.

She and her husband frequently collaborated and they published two editions of "Crystal Data" in 1954 and 1963 to compile the research of all crystallographers. Her area of expertise was in crystal chemistry and structural crystallography. She published more than 134 papers in her lifetime, almost half of which were collaborative projects with her husband.

Donnay published Laboratory Manual in Crystallography based on her classes at McGill University. She also published Women in the Geological Sciences in Canada in an effort correct the injustices that she experienced in the male-dominated field of geology.