Joan Feynman (1927–2020)

Joan Feynman was born in New York City, the daughter of Lucille Phillips Feynman and Melville Feynman, both Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Her older brother was Richard P. Feynman, with whom she shared an intense curiosity about the natural world from an early age. Her mother and grandmother tried to dissuade her from studying science, because they believed it was unsuitable for women, but her brother always encouraged her. She graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, where she met her first husband Richard (Dick) Hirschburg, whom she married in 1948. The couple would have three children. She enrolled in graduate studies in physics at Syracuse University, where she studied solid state theory under Melvin Lax. During this time, she took a year off to live in Guatemala, where she studied the Maya peoples. She obtained her doctorate in physics in 1958, and conducted postdoctoral work at Columbia University. She spent most of her 60-year career studying solar wind, auroras, and sunspots, working at the NASA Ames Research Center; the High Altitude Observatory; the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado; the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC; and Boston College, Massachusetts. In 1985, she became a senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where she worked until her retirement in 2003. In 1974, she became the first woman to be elected as an officer of the American Geophysical Union. In 1987, she married her second husband, fellow astrophysicist Alexander Ruzmaikin. In 2002, she was honored by NASA with their Exceptional Achievement Medal. She's the author or co-author of more than 100 scientific publications, and has written three books. Her son Charles Hirshberg is a journalist and sportswriter.