Joan Berkowitz

Joan B. Berkowitz (March 13, 1931 – January 22, 2020) was an American chemist. Her areas of research included materials for the space program, reusable molds for spacecraft construction built from molybdenum disilicides and tungsten disilicides, and the disposal and treatment of hazardous wastes. She was the first woman to serve as president of The Electrochemical Society.

Biography Born in Brooklyn, New York on March 13, 1931, Berkowitz attended PS 42, John Marshall Junior High School, and Midwood High School. She created a science project analyzing weather maps from the New York Times to study the movement of weather patterns. She earned a scholarship to Swarthmore College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in 1952. At Swarthmore she published her first paper, "The Preparation of trans 4-chlorocyclohexanol".

Berkowitz wished to follow her high school boyfriend and fellow Swarthmore graduate Arthur Mattuck to Princeton University, but at the time Princeton did not accept women for graduate school in chemistry. Instead she attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, graduating with a PhD in physical chemistry in 1955. Her dissertation was "Studies on Electrolytes", which focused on the application of the Poisson–Boltzmann equation to polymeric electrolytes. She used ILLIAC I, an early computer, for the numerical solutions.

In the 1970s her work concerned environmental matters. She headed a team which created the two volume Physical, Chemical and Biological Treatment Techniques for Industrial Wastes (1976), a survey of manufactured goods and their potential for causing pollution. She examined limestone scrubbers that removed sulfur dioxide, demonstrated how to reduce hard deposits which hindered their effectiveness, and improved their design. She also studied the disposal of hazardous wastes in landfills and produced the first handbook on alternative disposal methods. By the 1980s she was a vice president and later head of the Environmental Business World Wide section at A.D. Little.

Berkowitz died on January 22, 2020, at the age of 88.

Awards and honors 2005, Stanley J. Drazek award for excellence in teaching, University of Maryland University College (UMUC) Graduate School of Management and Technology 2002-2003, Sylvia M. Stoesser Lecturer in Chemistry