Patricia Cladis

Patricia Elisabeth Cladis (July 13, 1937 – July 3, 2017) was a Canadian-American physicist who specialized in the physics of liquid crystals. She was a research physicist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey from 1972 to 1997 She was a fellow of the American Physical Society and also received a Guggenheim fellowship.

Early life Cladis was born in Shanghai. She then went on to acquire her M.A. in physics from the University of Toronto in 1960. During her time in Paris, she worked with the Orsay Liquid Crystal Group, whose founder, Professor Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, later went on to receive the Nobel Prize in 1991 for his work on liquid crystals and polymers.

She held visiting appointments at a number of institutions, including Northwestern University, where she was the recipient of the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Professor award, an endowment given by the Gender and Sexuality Studies department of Northwestern University to recognize women who have made major contributions to their fields. Other institutions include University of Paris (Orsay), Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, École Normale Supérieure, Weizmann Institute of Science, University of Duisburg-Essen, and University of Bayreuth. She was on the Editorial Board of Liquid Crystals from 1986-1993.

Later life Cladis died on July 3, 2017, in Summit, New Jersey.