Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber - Career

Career

For the first six months of her stay in London, Gertrude lived off the money she made from selling her Leica camera, as well as money earned from translating German to English. Gertrude found that having a Ph.D. was a disadvantage as there were more spots for refugee students than for refugee scientists. She wrote to 35 other refugee scientists looking for work, and was told by all but one that there were already too many refugee scientists already working. Only Maurice Goldhaber wrote back offering any hope, stating that he thought she might be able to find work in Cambridge. Gertrude was able to find work in George Paget Thomson's lab working on electron diffraction. Although she had a post-doctoral position with Thomson, Gertrude realized that she was not going to be offered a real position with him and so looked for other work.

In 1939 Gertrude married Maurice Goldhaber. She then moved to Urbana, Illinois to join him at the University of Illinois. The state of Illinois had strict anti-nepotism laws at the time which prevented Gertrude Goldhaber from being hired by the university because her husband already had a position there. Gertrude was granted neither salary nor laboratory space, and worked in Maurice's lab as an unpaid assistant. Since Maurice's lab was only set up for nuclear physics research, Gertrude Goldhaber took up research in that field as well. During this time Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber had two sons: Alfred and Michael. Goldhaber was eventually given a soft-money line by the department to help support her research.

Goldhaber studied neutron-proton and neutron-nucleus reaction cross sections in 1941, and gamma radiation emission and absorption by nuclei in 1942. Around this time she also observed that spontaneous nuclear fission is accompanied by the release of neutrons — a result that had be theorized earlier but had yet to be shown. Her work with spontaneous nuclear fission was classified during the war, and was only published after the war ended in 1946.

Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber moved from Illinois to Long Island where they both joined the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory. At the laboratory she founded a series of monthly lectures known as the Brookhaven Lecture Series which is still continuing as of June 2009.