Gertrude S. Goldhaber Collection

Gertrude Scharff was born in Mannheim, Germany on July 14, 1911, the elder daughter of Otto Scharff and Nelly (Steinharter) Scharff. Gertrude displayed an interest in physics and mathematics from a young age, which her parents supported, although her father did at one point want her to become a lawyer. The family moved to Munich when Gertrude was 5 years old. She passed her examination at the Munich Realgymnasium in the spring of 1930, after which she began studying experimental and theoretical physics, mathematics and chemistry at the University of Munich. While studying at the University of Munich, she also spent several semesters at the University of Freiburg, the University of Zurich, and the University of Berlin. She then returned to the University of Munich, where she undertook her doctoral thesis research in Walter Gerlach’s laboratory. She completed her Ph.D. in experimental physics summa cum laude in June 1935 and published her dissertation on the effects of stress and high temperature on the magnetic qualities above the Curie point of nickel in 1936.

After the Nazi party gained power in 1933, Gertrude’s parents moved to Switzerland, but they ultimately returned to Germany and died during the Holocaust in November 1941. Gertrude’s younger sister, Liselotte, escaped to France and Gertrude herself was able to escape to London in 1935. At first, she had difficulty finding work in England, where there were positions for refugee students but not for refugee scientists, so she did translation work. She wrote to 35 other refugee scientists in England in an attempt to find work, but only Maurice Goldhaber, whom she had previously met as a student at the University of Berlin, wrote back with any positive suggestion, that she might be able to find a job at Cambridge University. Gertrude instead found a post-doctoral position at the University of London's Imperial College in George Paget Thomson’s laboratory, where she needed to quickly change her focus to particle physics, working on oxide formation on iron surfaces using electron diffraction. She held this post-doctoral position from 1935-1939.

Maurice Goldhaber moved to Urbana, Illinois to become a physics professor at the University of Illinois in 1938. Maurice and Gertrude were married on May 24, 1939, after which Gertrude joined Maurice in Urbana. Unfortunately, the state of Illinois had such strict anti-nepotism laws that Gertrude was not allowed to receive a salary from the university because Maurice worked there, nor could she have her own laboratory space. She therefore had to work as an unpaid assistant in Maurice’s nuclear physics laboratory, where she did experimental physics work on neutron-proton and neutron-nucleus reaction cross sections and gamma radiation emission and absorption by nuclei. In 1942 she discovered that spontaneous nuclear fission is accompanied by the release of neutrons, although this discovery was kept secret until 1946, after World War II had ended. While in Illinois, Gertrude and Maurice had two sons, Alfred in 1940 and Michael in 1942. Gertrude was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1947, after which the University physics department eventually gave her some money to support her research. She became a research assistant professor in 1948 and around the same time Gertrude and Maurice together established the identity of beta particles with atomic electrons.

In 1950 the Goldhaber family moved to Long Island where both Gertrude and Maurice joined the staff at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Gertrude was the first woman with a Ph.D. in physics on the Brookhaven faculty. Gertrude started as an associate physicist, her first regular long-term, paid position since she had received her doctorate in 1935. She was promoted to physicist in 1958 and senior physicist in 1962. Her work at Brookhaven consisted of both theoretical and experimental work, focusing mainly on systematizing the properties of nuclear energy levels across the entire periodic table and researching nuclear structure. She was also involved in developing the phenomenological variable moment of inertia (VMI) model, starting in 1969, and developed three-dimensional plots of data. She plotted the energy of the lowest nuclear excitation against the number of protons and the number of neutrons in the nucleus, using wooden bars to help others understand her research visually. Such work is now quite common but is done with computer modeling.

In addition to her research, Gertrude was involved with many committees and organizations. She started the monthly Brookhaven Lecture Series in 1960, which invited scientists from the BNL and other laboratories to share their research with colleagues across the scientific community. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1972, where she was only the third female physicist elected; worked for several organizations concerned with nuclear data; was a member of the American Physical Society's Committee on the Status of Women in Physics in 1971; a member of the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee for the Physical Sciences; and was on the Board of Trustees of Universities Research Association, Inc. She was also deeply involved in promoting science education at all levels, for young children, high school and college students, members of the non-scientific public, and early-career researchers, particularly girls and women. This included her position as an American Physical Society councilor and chair of its panel on Pre-College Physics Education, her work to bring children and students to visit the Brookhaven labs, and her founding of a training institute for local science and mathematics teachers on Long Island. In 1979, Gertrude was a co-founder of the Brookhaven Women in Science. She was also an advisor and consultant at the National Research Council's human resources Committee on the Education and Employment of Women in Science and Engineering (CEEWISE) and the National Academy of Sciences' committee on human rights.

Gertrude was forced to retire from Brookhaven in 1977 at the age of 66, as was the policy at Brookhaven National Laboratory, although Maurice did not retire until 1985 at age 74. She held adjunct professorships at Cornell University and Johns Hopkins University in the 1980s and continued to do research. She received the Long Island Achiever's Award in Science in 1982 and the 1990 Outstanding Woman Scientist Award from the New York Chapter of the Association for Women Scientists. Gertrude served as a Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar in 1984-1985, which sent her to eight university campuses. In 1985 she returned to Brookhaven as a research collaborator, where she stayed until 1990. Gertrude S. Goldhaber died February 2, 1998, after a long illness.