Noemie Benczer Koller

Noemie Benczer Koller (born August 21, 1933) is a nuclear physicist. She was the first tenured female professor of Rutgers College.

Early life and education Koller was born Noemie Benczer in Vienna, Austria, on born August 21, 1933. Her father was a Ph.D. chemist and her mother worked as a bookbinder. They subsequently emigrated to Cuba, and then to Mexico where she attended the Lycée Franco-Mexicain beginning in 1943. Koller later wrote a brief biography of Dr. Wu for the National Academy of Sciences. She has written that Wu was an "extremely careful experimentalist," and credits Wu with giving her a hands-on education with experimental technique. She was the first woman hired in the Physics department;

According to the 'Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics' (CWP) Project of the UCLA entry on Koller, Koller was a pioneer in several areas of nuclear and condensed matter physics, including the first identification of the double gamma decay of the observationally stable but theoretically unstable 40Ca isotope to the ground state: a 0+ → 0+ transition; the observation of the interplay of single particle and collective motions in nuclei; and the description of a broad range of nuclear electromagnetic transitions in the rare earth region using a simple relation based on constant gyromagnetic ratios for nucleon pairs. Accordering to the Encyclopedia of World Scientists, she was the first person to directly measure the "magnetic moments of super-deformed nuclear states" and developed techniques "to study magnetic properties of nuclei far from the valley of stability." She was the director of the nuclear physics laboratory from 1986 to 1989. At Rutgers, Koller served in the administration of the university as the associate dean for sciences of the faculty of arts and sciences from 1992 to 1996, and was active in the American Physical Society (APS), serving on many national committees, as well as chair of the 2,500-member APS Nuclear Physics Division. Koller is a strong supporter of women in science and has contributed a significant amount of research to the physics community internationally.

Personal life While in graduate school at Columbia University in 1956, Noemie Benczer married fellow physics student Earl Leonard Koller. New Jersey Women of Achievement Award, 1997 Distinguished Service Award of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics, 2006 Dwight Nicholson Medal for human outreach, American Physical Society, 2010 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science