Q And R Are For...

Happy Sunday! I hope you all are having an amazing day of rest. I'm cheating a bit and posting today so that by Tuesday I'll be back on track with the A to Z.

Q is for Helen Quinn, particle physicist. She earned her doctorate in physics from Stanford University in 1967, when less than 2% of the world's physicists were women. Her post-doctoral work was completed at the DESY (the German Electron Synchrotron). Helen had the distinction of teaching and working at Harvard University for seven years until her return to Stanford, where she is currently a professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Her contributions to the field of particle physics include her work with Howard Georgi and Steven Weinberg. They showed how the three types of particle interactions (strong, electromagnetic and weak) become "similar in extreme high energy processes and so might be three aspects of a unified force." This sentence is straight from Wikipedia as I have a very nominal understanding of particle physics. With Enrico Poggio and again Steven Weinberg, Helen also discovered the quark-hadron duality property. 

Helen works with elementary and high school teachers to make physics fun and more accessible. She wants to encourage more people to understand and study her field. Dr. Quinn is a fellow and Past President of the American Physical Society and was the recipient of the Oscar Klein Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2008. Along with Howard Georgi and Jogesh Pati, she received the Dirac Medal from the International Center for Theoretical Physics in 2000. The woman's brain is beyond brilliant and I hope there are oodles more like her.

R is for Edith Nourse Rogers, legislator and political leader. She served as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I and became the presidential representative in charge of assisting disabled veterans for the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover Administrations. In 1925, she was elected to serve out her late husband's term in Congress where she became the longest serving woman in the House of Representatives.

During her 17 terms in office, she wrote legislation to establish the GI Bill of Rights for returning veterans of World War II, allowing them to apply for low interest loans, go to college and obtain job training. Even more impressive to me was her introduction of legislation at the start World War II to establish the Women's Auxiliary Army Corp (WAAC). Thanks to Edith's vision, women serve in all branches of the military today. She also fought for a 48 hour work week for women and supported equal pay for equal work.

Thank you so much for stopping by, I truly ppreciate the visits and comments. For more awesome A to Z challengers, click here.