Sara Jane Rhoads

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Sara Jane Rhoads (born June 1, 1920 in Kansas City , Missouri , † May 1, 1993 in Laramie , Wyoming ) was an American chemist .

Life

Sara Jane Rhoads was born in 1920 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Errett Stanley Rhoads and Charlotte Rhoads, née Kraft. She was the youngest of six siblings and attended public schools in her hometown through to junior college . She then went to the University of Chicago , where she received her bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1941 . Until 1943 she worked in the development department of the Lindsay Light and Chemical Company in Chicago and was then a teacher at the Radford School in El Paso , Texas (1943-1944) and at Hollins College in Virginia (1944-1945). Rhoads went as a PhD student at the Columbia University in New York City , where she in 1949 under William von Eggers Doering in organic chemistry doctorate.

In September 1948 Sara Jane Rhoads moved to the University of Wyoming , where she worked until her retirement in 1984. She was one of only two women, along with 161 men, to receive a Senior Post Doctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation between 1956 and 1971 , and became one of the first women professors of chemistry in the United States. In the more than 35 years at the university, she mainly devoted herself to teaching and was instrumental in setting up the chemistry faculty, of which she was director in 1967/68.

Her nephew Richard E. Smalley , who admired her and worked in her laboratories in the 1960s, was inspired by her to pursue a career as a chemist. Smalley has been a pioneer in the field of nanotechnology and received 1996 together with Robert Curl and Harold Kroto of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of fullerenes .

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Sara Jane Rhoads papers, 1938-1994. University of Wyoming Libraries, accessed May 27, 2015.
  2. ↑ a b c Ingmar Grenthe (Ed.): Nobel Lectures in Chemistry, 1996-2000. World Scientific, 2003, ISBN 978-9810249595 , pp. 81-83 (Richard E. Smalley).
  3. ^ Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology et al. (Ed.): Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. National Academies Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0309072939 , p. 14.
personal data
SURNAME Rhoads, Sara Jane
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH June 1, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Kansas City (Missouri)
DATE OF DEATH May 1, 1993
Place of death Laramie, Wyoming