Joan Feynman

Early life Feynman was raised in the Far Rockaway section of Queens, New York City, along with her elder brother, Richard Feynman (who became a Nobel Prize-winning physicist).

Joan was an inquisitive child, and she exhibited an interest in understanding the natural world from an early age. However, her mother told her, “Women’s brains can’t do science”. Despite this, her brother Richard always encouraged her to be curious about the universe. “Richard was my first teacher”, she recalled. Later, Feynman found comfort in an astronomy book given to her by her brother. She became convinced that she could, in fact, study science, when she came across a graph based on research by astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. She earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Oberlin in 1948. That year, she married the anthropologist Richard Hirshberg. During her graduate years, Feynman took a year off to live with her husband in Guatemala, where they studied the anthropology of the Maya peoples. She was a co-author, along with her husband and Betty J. Meggers, of a 1957 paper on anthropology. Feynman eventually earned her doctorate in physics in 1958. Her thesis was “Absorption of Infrared Radiation in Crystals of Diamond-Type Lattice Structure”. She also completed postdoctoral work at Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory.

Feynman helped to develop a model for estimating the environmental hazards of the local space environment. High-velocity coronal mass ejections are known to cause geomagnetic storms, which can have dangerous effects on both spacecraft and on humans in space. Fast-moving coronal mass ejections cause shock waves in the solar wind, speeding up solar particles and instigating geomagnetic storms as the particles arrive at the outer edge of Earth's magnetosphere. Often, the commencement of such storms is coupled with a high influx of protons, which can wreak havoc on communications systems and space flight activities. Feynman's model ultimately helped engineers determine the flux of high-energy particles that would affect a spacecraft over its functional lifetime. Her work in this area led to important new developments in spacecraft design.

Feynman retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a senior scientist in 2003. However, she continued to work, publishing in 2009 on the influence of solar activity on the climate of the first millennium.

During her career, Feynman was an author or co-author of more than 100 scientific publications and edited three scientific books.

In 2000, she was awarded NASA's Exceptional Achievement Medal.

Personal life

Feynman had one daughter, Susan Hirshberg, and two sons, Charles Hirshberg and Matt Hirshberg, from her first marriage, to anthropologist Richard Irwin Hirshberg (born 1924). Feynman met Hirshberg at Oberlin College, and they married in 1948, separated in 1974, and later divorced.