Gertrud Kornfeld
Gertrud Kornfeld (born July 25, 1891 in Prague , † July 4, 1955 in Rochester , USA ) was a German chemist . She was the first and only woman in the Weimar Republic to complete her habilitation in chemistry. Her main areas of work were photochemistry and reaction kinetics .
Life
After studying chemistry was at the 1915 Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague doctorate . She initially worked as a demonstrator and from 1914 as an assistant at the Chemical Institute. After the political upheavals and the establishment of Czechoslovakia , she left Prague in 1919 and got a job as a volunteer assistant with Max Bodenstein at the Technical University of Hanover . With him she moved to the Physico-Chemical Institute of Berlin University in 1925 . In 1928 she was the first and only woman to complete her habilitation in chemistry at a university in the Weimar Republic . In 1933 her license to teach was revoked due to anti-Semitic Nazi legislation, and in the same year she first emigrated to England . There she received a scholarship to Nottingham University , but was unsuccessful in the search for permanent employment. So she worked until 1936 with another scholarship in Vienna , from where she left for the USA in 1937 on a visitor visa . She did not succeed in a university career here, at least she found a job in a research laboratory of the Eastman Kodak Co. in Rochester. In 1929 she invented a diaphragm manometer for measuring small pressures, published numerous articles on photochemistry in specialist journals and made a pioneering contribution to their development. Her research areas included the kinetics of gaseous reactions and the theory of photography.
In 2015, a street was named after her in a new industrial park ( Clean Tech Business Park ) in the Marzahn district of Berlin .
literature
- Annette Vogt: From the back entrance to the main portal? Lise Meitner and her colleagues at the Berlin University and in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Stuttgart 2007 (= Pallas Athene, Vol. 17).
- Ilse Korotin (Ed.): BiografıA. Lexicon of Austrian Women. Volume 3: P-Z. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2016, ISBN 978-3-205-79590-2 , pp 1756-1757 ( digitized ).
- Heinz Walter: Kornfeld, Gertrud. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 590 f. ( Digitized version ).
Web links
- Biography of Gertrud Kornfeld
- Literature by and about Gertrud Kornfeld in the catalog of the German National Library
- ↑ BVV decision of the Berlin district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf of 25 February 2015; Press release on the personal biographies of the new street names.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kornfeld, Gertrude |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German chemist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 25, 1891 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Prague |
| DATE OF DEATH | 4th July 1955 |
| Place of death | Rochester |