Joan Freeman

Joan Maie Freeman (7 January 1918 – 18 March 1998) was an Australian physicist.

Biography Joan Maie Freeman was born in Perth, Australia on 7 January 1918. Her family moved to Sydney in 1922 and she attended the Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School. While still a girl, she took evening classes at Sydney Technical College. The school hid her attendance from inspectors, as they thought a girl in the class would reflect negatively on the college. She completed her Intermediate Certificate Examination and earned a place at the University of Sydney in 1936. Freeman studied mathematics, chemistry, physics and zoology, and was often the only woman, indeed the school stipulated that a seat had to be left vacant between women and men in a lecture hall).

In 1951 Freeman became Senior Scientific Officer at the Harwell Tandem Accelerator Group. She later led the group and received the Ernest Rutherford Medal and Prize in 1976 with Roger Blin-Stoyle, for their research of the beta-radioactivity of complex nuclei. She was the first woman to win the Ernest Rutherford Medal and Prize.

Freeman wrote the 1991 book A Passion for Physics. Freeman married John Jelley in 1958. She died in Oxford on 18 March 1998.