Scharff-Goldhaber, Gertrude (b. 1911)
Scharff-Goldhaber, Gertrude (b. 1911)
American physicist. Name variations: Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber; Mrs. Maurice Goldhaber. Born Gertrude Scharff in Mannheim, Germany, on July 14, 1911; daughter of Otto Scharff and Nelly (Steinharter) Scharff; attended universities of Freiburg, Zurich, and Berlin; Ph.D., University of Munich, 1935; married Maurice Goldhaber (director of Brookhaven National Laboratory), on May 24, 1939; sister-in-law of Sulamith Goldhaber (d. 1965, also a physicist); children: Alfred Scharff Goldhaber; Michael Henry Goldhaber.
Born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1911, nuclear physicist Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber had a long and influential career. Scharff-Goldhaber was a research associate at the Imperial College in London from 1935 to 1939. Following her marriage to Maurice Goldhaber, director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, she arrived in the United States in 1939 and became a naturalized citizen in 1944. She was a research physicist at the University of Illinois, Champaign, from 1939 to 1948, an assistant professor from 1948 to 1950, associate physicist at Brookhaven from 1950 to 1958, and senior physicist from 1962 on. At Brookhaven, she was immersed in both theoretical and experimental work, ascertaining the detailed properties of nuclear energy levels and magnetic moments to gain a better grasp of nuclear structure. She served on the Committee on Problems of Women in Physics in 1971.