Katharine Blodgett Gebbie (July 4, 1932 – August 17, 2016) was an American astrophysicist and civil servant. She was the founding director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and of its two immediate predecessors, the Physics Laboratory and the Center for Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, both for which she was the only director. During her 22 years of management of these institutions, four of its scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2015, the NIST Katharine Blodgett Gebbie Laboratory Building in Boulder, Colorado was named in her honor.
Early life Katharine Blodgett Gebbie was born as Katharine Blodgett in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1932. She is the namesake of her aunt, Katharine Burr Blodgett (1898-1979), who was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge, and subsequently joined the research laboratories of the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York. In an autobiographical memoir, Gebbie recalled that on family visits her Aunt Katharine:
always arrived with suitcases full of 'apparatus', with which she showed us such wonders as how to make colors by dipping glass rods into thin films of oil floating on water.
She often spoke in later life of her aunt's influence by personal example on her choice of a career in science.
Undergraduate education Indeed, she began on the same academic pathway as her aunt, enrolling in Bryn Mawr College in 1951, where she majored in physics. Due to the death of her father, she returned in 1954 to live with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There she completed her senior undergraduate year studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Marriage At MIT she met a Scottish experimental physicist, Hugh Alastair Gebbie (1922–2005). As Katharine recalled,
"I guess it all began when I met a young man at MIT who for some reason or other wanted to marry me. And I thought at that time, I said, Well, no, I really have too many other things I want to do besides get married. And he said, "What are they?" And I said, Well, I'd like to live in London and I'd like to study astronomy and I'd like to get a Ph.D. And he said, Marry me and you will do all those things. And I did." They married in 1957 and remained wed until Alastair's death in 2005.
Graduate education After graduation from Bryn Mawr College with a B.A. in physics in 1957, Gebbie enrolled in University College London (UCL), where she earned a B.Sc. degree in astronomy in 1960 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1964. Her Ph.D. thesis, "A theoretical study of the atmospheres of hot stars," was supervised by Prof. Michael J. Seaton, FRS, with whom she also published a study of planetary nebulae. Seaton's research group was then a center for theoretical atomic physics as well as astrophysics. Gebbie's training in both subjects set her on the path to her future career.
Early career The early 1960s were a time of significant public investment in research in both atomic physics and astrophysics, due to their combined importance for understanding the upper atmosphere, plasma diagnostics, guided missile systems, and satellite and space flight. In 1962, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) and the University of Colorado established a cooperative research institute on the University's campus in Boulder, Colorado: the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA). "Laboratory astrophysics" is the practice of studying, in terrestrial laboratories, the basic physical processes that are important in astrophysics, and performing theoretical and computational simulation of astrophysical phenomena from fundamental physics. Atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics was (and is) one of the most important branches of fundamental physics with astrophysical applications, and it was a subject particularly emphasized at JILA. According to Gebbie,
"the physics department [of UCL], with Mike Seaton, my supervisor, had very close relations with JILA and I think I was one of three students there who eventually came to JILA. That was the best move that I think I could have made." Gebbie started at JILA in 1966 as a research associate of the University of Colorado.
Career at the National Bureau of Standards In 1968, Gebbie was appointed to the position of Physicist at NBS, which had its own group of astrophysicists who worked in collaboration with University of Colorado colleagues at the JILA site. Other senior NBS staff at JILA who worked on astrophysics and astronomy in that era included Jeffrey L. Linsky and David G. Hummer. Gebbie worked in this capacity at JILA until 1985, except for temporary duty at NBS headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland, during 1981-84 . Her scientific work at JILA dealt with solar and stellar spectroscopy, radiative transfer in stellar atmospheres, and helioseismology. Some of her scientific papers from that period are listed below. In 1978, she was elected a JILA Fellow, and served as such until 1990. While at JILA, Gebbie became friends with former NBS Director Edward Condon. She recalled him fondly in later life, and two portraits of him were mounted on the walls of her office in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Introduction to technical management Gebbie recalled that,
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