Isabel Joy Bear

Early life and education Bear was born in Camperdown, Victoria. Her parents were Isabel Hilda Bear and Rolfe William Bear. She worked with the Western Mining Co., Ltd., with whom she extracted lithium from Western Australian spodumene.

In 1964 Bear and her colleague Dick Thomas became the first to scientifically describe the smell of rain, for which Thomas coined the term petrichor. Thomas and Bear, like many researchers before them, noticed that dry clays and soils evolve a characteristic odour when they were breathed upon. She performed a series of experiments; steam distilling rocks that had been exposed to dry conditions. During these investigations Bear noticed that the smell was due to a yellowish oil, which they named "petrichor" – blood of the stone. In 2015 researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a high speed video that visualised the aerosols released during rainfall.

In 1967 Bear was promoted to the research staff in the Division of Mineral Chemistry at CSIRO, and was the first and only woman to hold such a position.

Bear retired from the CSIRO in 2015 after a career of more than 70 years. 1986 Member of the Order of Australia 1988 Royal Australian Chemical Institute Leighton Memorial Medal