Margaret G. Kivelson

Career Kivelson completed her PhD thesis "Bremsstrahlung of High Energy Electrons' in 1957. Her thesis provided an expression for the cross section of forward scattering to all orders in the Coulomb interaction. developed new ways of describing wave-particle interactions in magnetohydrodynamic waves, and provided insight into the mechanism of interchange diffusion in rotating plasmas. This research has led Kivelson to being an author or co-author on over 350 publications that have accumulated over 12,000 citations.

Gender gap Some of Kivelson's recollections about establishing a career as a woman scientist have been documented in an interview by the American Astronomical Society and piece in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. When she started to pursue her undergraduate degree in physics her family joked she was really pursuing a "Mrs" degree. Before World War II, courses at Radcliffe were segregated by gender from courses at Harvard. When she attended Radcliffe/Harvard in the first class after the war, classes did not return to being segregated. She was often the only woman in her courses. Harvard University's 350th Anniversary Alumni Medal (1986) Fleming Medal of the American Geophysical Union (2005) Gerard P. Kuiper Prize of the American Astronomical Society (2017) James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society (2021)