Noemie Benczer Koller facts for kids

Noemie Benczer Koller is a brilliant nuclear physicist. She studies the tiny parts that make up atoms. She made history as the first woman to become a permanent professor at Rutgers College.

Early Life and Education

Noemie Benczer was born in Vienna, Austria, on August 21, 1933. Her dad was a chemist, and her mom was a bookbinder. Her family moved a lot when she was young because of World War II. They moved from Vienna to Paris, and then several times within France to stay safe from the German invasion.

Later, her family moved to Cuba, and then to Mexico. In Mexico, she went to the Lycée Franco-Mexicain starting in 1943. After finishing high school in 1951, she came to New York for college.

She got into Barnard College, which was a women's college connected to Columbia University. She finished her physics degree in just two years! In 1953, she started graduate school at Columbia University. She earned her master's degree in 1955 and her Ph.D. in experimental physics in 1958. She continued her research at Columbia until 1960.

While studying, Koller worked with Chien-Shiung Wu. Dr. Wu was a famous physicist who studied how atoms decay. Wu became a very important mentor and friend to Koller. Koller later wrote about Dr. Wu's amazing work. She said Wu was a "very careful experimentalist" and taught her a lot about doing experiments.

Amazing Career in Physics

In 1960, Koller started working at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She was the first woman hired in their Physics department. In 1965, she became the first woman to get a permanent teaching position at Rutgers College.

At Rutgers, she was a key part of the nuclear physics research team. They used a special machine called a Van de Graaff accelerator to study atoms. She also studied how materials behave using something called the Mössbauer effect. This helped her understand the magnetic properties of different materials.

Noemie Koller was a pioneer in many areas of physics. She was one of the first to identify a rare type of decay in a calcium atom. She also studied how tiny particles and larger movements work together inside atoms. She even found a simple way to describe how atoms in the rare earth region change.

She was the first person to directly measure the "magnetic moments of super-deformed nuclear states." These are very unusual shapes that atomic nuclei can take. She also created new ways to study the magnetic properties of atoms that are far from their usual stable forms.

Koller also took on many leadership roles. She was part of important panels for the US National Science Foundation. She also directed the nuclear physics laboratory at Rutgers from 1986 to 1989. From 1992 to 1996, she was an associate dean at the university. She was very active in the American Physical Society (APS), leading many committees. She even chaired the APS Nuclear Physics Division, which had 2,500 members! Koller is a strong supporter of women in science and has made huge contributions to physics around the world.

Personal Life

In 1956, while in graduate school, Noemie Benczer married Earl Leonard Koller. He was also a physics student. When Noemie started working at Rutgers, Earl got a job at the Stevens Institute of Technology. The Kollers had two sons: David, who became a geologist, and Daniel, who became a physicist.

Awards and Honors

• Fellow, American Physical Society, 1966
• New Jersey Women of Achievement Award, 1997
• Rutgers University Daniel Gorenstein Memorial Award, 2001
• Distinguished Service Award of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics, 2006
• Dwight Nicholson Medal for human outreach, American Physical Society, 2010
• Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science