Vera Kistiakowsky

Vera Kistiakowsky (September 9, 1928 – December 11, 2021) was an American research physicist, teacher, and arms control activist. She was professor emerita at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the physics department and Laboratory for Nuclear Science, and was an activist for women's participation in the sciences. Kistiakowsky was an expert in experimental particle physics and observational astrophysics. Her hobbies included climbing mountains, and she liked to maintain an energetic and fit lifestyle. She was the first woman appointed MIT professor of physics in 1972.

Education and family Kistiakowsky was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1928. She was the daughter of physical chemist George Kistiakowsky, who taught at Harvard and served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's science adviser. Her mother, Hildegard Moebius, was the daughter of a Lutheran pastor and she went to school in Berlin to get her M.D. However, she never got her M.D, and instead worked as a technician and supported medical units on the front lines of World War I.

She earned her A.B. in chemistry from Mount Holyoke College in 1948 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1952. After earning her Ph.D. in 1952, specializing in promethium isotopes at the University of California, Berkeley, she transitioned to experimental nuclear physics during her postdoctoral fellowship with Luis Alvarez. At MIT she began her career as a staff member of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science where she worked from 1963 to 1969. She was senior research scientist in the MIT Department of Physics from 1969 to 1971.

In 1972 she was the first woman appointed MIT professor of physics. Still, at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science, Vera demonstrated a passionate commitment to addressing gender disparities within the scientific community. She co-founded WISE (Women in Science and Engineering), with two colleagues, Elizabeth Baranger and Vera Pless, which advocated for women scientists and developed a committee within the American Physical Society to address gender equality further.

Kistiakowsky published more than 70 scientific papers during her career, covering experimental nuclear physics, experimental high-energy particle physics, and later astrophysics. Her early research included measurements of promethium isotopes, work that formed part of her doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. In a 1952 paper in Physical Review, she reported measurements of the half-lives and radiation characteristics of several promethium isotopes, including promethium-141, -142, -143, -144, -146, -149, and -150. She subsequently conducted nuclear-physics research at Columbia University, including a 1955 study of metastable states in several isotopes produced by proton bombardment. Later in her career, she moved into observational astrophysics, studying astronomical sources including supernovae and planetary nebulae.

Committee and organization work In 1969 she co-founded the Boston area group Women in Science and Engineering (WISE), a precursor to the Boston chapter of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS). Kistiakowsky served as chair or member on numerous MIT committees and groups relating to women at MIT and affirmative action at MIT, including the Women's Forum, and the Ad Hoc Committee on the Role of Women at MIT. In 1971 she founded the American Physical Society (APS) Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, securing a US$10,000 Sloan Foundation grant to produce a questionnaire on women's conditions of employment. The committee also created a roster of female physicists, "to counter claims that there were no qualified ones to hire". The committee's two and a half inch report convinced the APS to establish the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics in 1972, a committee still working today.

Other committees that she has been involved in include the National Research Council Conference on Women in Science and Engineering, and the Association for Women in Science, Women in Science and Engineering.