Nuclear physicist Faye Ajzenberg-Selove was the second woman to be appointed
professor at the
University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences. Her mother was a Polish
mezzo-soprano; her father was a mining engineer from
St. Petersberg, Russia. Ajzenberg-Selove went on to become a noted physicist in the study of
nuclear spectroscopy of light elements.
She
organized the first session of the American Physical Society meeting to deal with
women in physics and helped found the American Physical Society's Committee
on Women in Physics. She wrote an autobiography, A Matter of Choices:
Memoirs of a Female Physicist.
She was on the faculty of Haverford College from 1957 to 1970. She produced a series of papers
entitled, Energy Levels of Light Nuclei , on the experimental properties of
the light nuclei.