Chava Lifshitz

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Chava Lifschitz (born March 26, 1936 in Vienna , † March 1, 2005 in Jerusalem ) was an Israeli chemist who was best known for her contributions to mass spectrometry and the gas-phase chemistry of ions.

Life

Lifshitz was born as Eva Wolf into an upper middle class family; her father, Salomon Wolf (later Shlomo Wolf) was a lawyer in Vienna. After Austria was "annexed" to Nazi Germany in 1938, her father managed to emigrate to Palestine , which was then a British mandate. There she Hebrew her first name from "Eva" to "Chava". Chava Lifshitz was a gifted student; she also grew up in Israel following European traditions, including piano lessons with the Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim .

From 1953 Chava Lifshitz studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ; this was done as part of an Israeli program that combined study with completion of military service. She completed her master’s degree in 1958 and obtained her PhD in 1961 with a dissertation on "Isotope Effects in the Radiation Chemistry of Aqueous Solutions" under the supervision of G. Stein. She also met her husband Assa Lifshitz at the Hebrew University .

She then spent two formative years at Cornell University with mass spectrometry pioneer Franklin Asbury Long. In 1963 she returned to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she made a career and was appointed professor at the age of 40.

family

With her husband Assa Lifshitz she had three children, son Ron Lifshitz and daughters Donna and Orna Lifshitz. The couple had about half a dozen grandchildren. Chava Lifshitz died of longstanding cancer. At the same time, however, it had long survived the doctors' first prognoses; her daughter Orna reported at a memorial service that she was five years old when doctors gave Chava Lifshitz a lifetime of five years. It survived this prognosis by more than two decades and was active to the end. Two months before her death, she received a research grant.

Scientific work

Chava Lifshitz and her working group made important contributions to mass spectrometry as a measurement technique (including electrospray ionization and laser desorption spectrometry ), but also to the gas phase chemistry of ions (reaction dynamics, electron and photoionization, gas phase chemistry of clusters and fullerenes and, most recently, small peptides ). She had a longstanding cooperation with the German chemist Helmut Schwarz from the TU Berlin, among others . She was the author of approximately 250 original scientific papers that have appeared in leading journals.

Prices

Academic positions at the Hebrew University and in Israel

  • Head of the "Chemistry Studies Division" (1972–1976)
  • Head of the "Tenure Committee in the Experimental Sciences" (1984–1985)
  • Member of the Israeli Council for Higher Education (Israel, 1986–1991)
  • Head of the Physical Chemistry Department (1989–1992)
  • Member of the "High Committee for Science and Technology" (the so-called "Harari Commission", 1991–1992)
  • Head of the "Institute of Chemistry" (1994–1997)

Festschrift

  • Chava Lifshitz Festschrift of the International Journal of Mass Spectrometry and Ion Processes; Foreword by Profs. Robert C. Dunbar and Tilmann Märk (1997)

literature

  • Cornelius Klots: Chava Lifshitz: an appreciation , Int. J. Mass Spectrom. Ion Proc. 167, xi-xii (1997).
  • Tilmann Märk : Eulogy to Chava Lifshitz 1936-2005 , in: Mass Spectrometry Reviews (2005), 24, pp. 769-771.

Books

  • Chava Lifshitz, Julia Laskin: Principles of Mass Spectrometry Applied to Biomolecules , Wiley-Interscience Series on Mass Spectrometry, 1st Edition October 2006, ISBN 978-0-471-72184-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ biographical data, publications and Academic pedigree of Chava Lifshitz at academictree.org, accessed on March 8, 2018th
personal data
SURNAME Lifshitz, Chava
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wolf, Eva (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli chemist
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 1, 2005
Place of death Jerusalem