In Memoriam: Harriet Herta Forster, 1917-2014

Harriet Herta Forster, professor emerita of physics and astronomy in the Dornsife College of Arts, Letters and Sciences at the University of Southern California, died on September 28 in Los Angeles. She was 97 years old.

A native of Vienna, Austria, she escaped the Nazi occupation in 1939 by going to Scotland to work as a nanny. She moved to the United States a year later. Professor Forster earned a Ph.D. in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1948 and later that year joined the faculty at the University of Southern California. She was promoted to full professor in 1964.

For several years, Dr. Forster headed the university’s nuclear accelerator program. She published more than 60 papers on nuclear physics and was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Dr. Forster retired in 1987.