Melba Newell Phillips was an American physicist and pioneer science educator.
25 Facts About Melba Phillips
2.
One of the first doctoral students of J Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, Phillips completed her Ph.
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Melba Phillips was known for refusing to cooperate with a US Senate judiciary subcommittee's investigation on internal security during the McCarthy era that led to her dismissal from her professorship at Brooklyn College, where she was a professor of science from 1938 until 1952.
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Melba Phillips taught at the University of Minnesota and served as associate director of a teacher-training institute at Washington University in St Louis, before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago as a professor of physics.
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Melba Phillips was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Melba Phillips was born on February 1,1907, near Hazleton, Gibson County, Indiana.
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Melba Phillips was the only daughter and oldest of Eilda Elizabeth and Virgil B Phillips' four children.
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Melba Phillips graduated from Union High school in 1922, at the age of fifteen.
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Melba Phillips earned a master's degree in physics from Battle Creek College in Michigan in 1928 and a doctorate degree in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1933.
10.
Melba Phillips was one of the first doctoral students of J Robert Oppenheimer, who later became scientific head of the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to develop the atomic bomb.
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Melba Phillips held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California and at Bryn Mawr College.
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Melba Phillips's research focused on application of quantum mechanics to the study of nuclear physics.
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Melba Phillips conducted research on a part-time basis at the Columbia University Radiation Laboratory.
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In 1945, while teaching at Brooklyn College, Melba Phillips helped organize the Federation of American Scientists at a meeting held in Washington, DC.
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In 1952 Melba Phillips was summoned to appear before the McCarran Commission, a judiciary subcommittee investigating internal security during the McCarthy era.
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Melba Phillips remained unemployed as a college professor for five years.
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Melba Phillips returned to teaching in 1957, when she became associate director of a teacher-training institute at Washington University.
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Melba Phillips remained at St Louis until 1962, when she joined the faculty at the University of Chicago as a professor of physics.
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Melba Phillips retired as a professor emerita from the University of Chicago in 1972, but continued to teach elsewhere.
20.
Melba Phillips became a member of the AAPT in 1943 and served as its first woman president.
21.
When questioned about whether she was involved with the communist party, Melba Phillips chose to neither confirm or deny, but to simply state that her lineage goes back just as far as any other American.
22.
Melba Phillips was believed to hold the disposition that the committee's actions resembled those of the Witch Hunt referenced so often in times of panic.
23.
Melba Phillips died of coronary artery disease on November 8,2004, at the age of ninety-seven, in a nursing home in Petersburg, Indiana.
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Melba Phillips is especially noted for developing and implementing curriculum for teaching physics and co-authoring two textbooks in the 1950s for collegiate physics courses.
25.
Melba Phillips wrote and edited works history of physics and the history of the American Association of Physics Teachers.