Esther Marly (or Marley) Conwell

Born: 1922

Died: 2014

Country of Birth: USA

Nationality: USA

Ethnicity: White

Brooklyn College 1942; University of Rochester M.S., 1945; University of Chicago Ph.D., 1948-all degrees in Physics

"“My life is the story of women scientists making a place in the world. Although it’s not nirvana yet, women have come a long way in my working lifetime, and it gives me hope.” (rochester.edu); “I think the same things I love about ballet, I love about physics,” she once commented. “They’re both exact and require discipline. That sense of order is what really attracted me to physics in college.” (nationalmedals.org); “women had been treated better in industry than in academia.… I guess talented women seem to be getting more what they deserve in industry. They’re promoted.… On the subject of women in academia, I would say I have never gotten a reasonable offer of a job from a university, and I’ve had a good reputation for some time. I’m a member of both academies, for instance. So that says something, that I spent my life in industry.” (nap.nationalacademies.org); "

— Esther Marly (or Marley) Conwell

Field of Study: Physics

Institution/Corporation: University of Rochester; Bell Laboratories

Degrees & Memberships: Honorary Degree: Brooklyn College (1992); Member: IEEE (1980), American Physical Society, National Academy of Engineering (1980), National Academy of Sciences (1990), American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1992)

Awards: 1997 IEEE Edison Medal; 2009 National Medal of Science; 1960 Achievement Award, Society of Women Engineers; 2002 named 1 of the 50 Most Important Women in Science, Discover magazine; 2004 Dreyfus Senior Faculty Member Award; 2006 Susan B. Anthony Award, University of Rochester; 2008 ACS Award for Encouraging Women into Careers in the Chemical Sciences

Achievements: best known for the Conwell-Weisskopf theory that describes how electrons travel through semiconductors, a breakthrough that helped revolutionize modern computing; studied properties of semiconductors and organic conductors, especially electron transport; her textbook, High Field Transport in Semiconductors, became the authoritative text in the field; as a researcher at Bell Laboratories (1951–1952) she studied with William Shockley on the effects of high electric fields on electron transport in semiconductors; at Xerox, investigated transport and optical properties of doped polymers such as those used for photoreceptors in copiers; 1989 helped bring to the University of Rochester the NSF Center for Photoinduced Charge Transfer, a collaborative effort of Xerox, Eastman Kodak, and the university; promoted the controversial concept of polaronic charge conduction along DNA molecules and supported her ideas with quantum chemical calculations;