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.
Read more about this topic: Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)