Mary K. Gaillard, a renowned physicist and professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, passed away on May 23. She was 86 years old.
A native of New Brunswick, New Jersey, Dr. Gaillard earned a full scholarship to what is now Hollins University, a women’s college in Roanoke, Virginia. While pursuing her undergraduate degree, she participated in two summer internships at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. There, she conducted research on particle physics.
After graduating in 1960, she applied and was accepted to Columbia University, but decided instead to move to Paris in 1961. She applied to a doctoral program at what is now Paris-Saclay University, but was denied and told women could not do physics. Fortunately, she soon found a mentor to support her graduate studies and went on to earn two doctorates from Paris-Saclay.
In 1964, Dr. Galliard was recruited as a visiting scientist in the theory division at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, referred to as CERN. Unlike many of her male colleagues, she was never offered a salaried position. In 1980, she wrote the “Report on Women in Scientific Careers at CERN,” which found only 3 percent of the organization’s regular research staff were women and advocated for gender equality in promotion, maternity leave, and an on-campus daycare center.
The following year, Dr. Gaillard joined the faculty in the department of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the department’s first tenured woman professor and served as a faculty scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Throughout her long career, Dr. Gaillard’s scientific discoveries profoundly impacted the field of theoretical physics. During the 1970s, her calculations of the properties of new elementary particles helped validate the Standard Model of physics. For the remainder of her career, she focused on physics beyond the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry, supergravity, and string theory.
Dr. Gaillard was a member of several professional organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Physical Society. She also served as an advisor for the Department of Energy and the U.S. National Research Council. Additionally, she was a member of the National Science Board from 1996 to 2002.
As a pioneer in her field, Dr. Gaillard was dedicated to supporting future generations of women physicists. In 2015, she chronicled the accomplishments and challenges she faced over her five-decades-long career in her memoir, A Singularly Unfeminine Profession: One Woman’s Journey in Physics (World Scientific Publishing Company).