April 1, 1939 - Birth of Mary K. Gaillard, pioneer of theoretical physics

Specialising in particle physics, she was the first woman on the physics faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently a professor at UC Berkeley, a member of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, and a visiting scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

His research achievements include pioneering work (together with Benjamin W. Lee) on the evaluation of strong interaction corrections at weak transitions, including the successful prediction of the mass of the c (charm) quark.

He has also worked with John Ellis and others on the analysis of final states in electron-positron collisions and studies of unified gauge theories, including the prediction of the mass of the bottom quark, and has carried out studies with Michael Chanowitz of signals measured at proton-proton colliders.

His work in recent years has focused on effective superstring-based supergravity theories and their implications for phenomena that can be detected in both accelerator experiments and cosmological observations.

As a result of this work, she was awarded the J. J. Sakurai Prize for theoretical particle physics by the American Physical Society in 1993, becoming the first woman to win this prize.

She was a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) from 1964 to 1981, and a research associate at the Theoretical Division of CERN.

In 2015 she published her autobiography entitled ‘A Singularly Unfeminine Profession: One Woman's Journey in Physics,’.

If you want to know more, click on the following link: Mary K. Gaillard