A singularly unfeminine profession

May 12, 2016
12:00pm to 1:15pm

Blue room

General Public
Speaker: 
Mary K. Gaillard
Institution: 
Berkeley
Location&Place: 

Blue room

Abstract: 

I will recount some of my experiences as a woman in a very male-dominated field. The generallynurturing environment of my childhood and college years, as well as my experiences as asummer student in particle physics laboratories and as a first-year graduate student at Columbia University, left me unprepared for the difficulties that I would confront as a second-year graduate student in Paris, and later during my nearly twenty years at CERN. 

Concurrently I describe the physics developments that I witnessed and participated in, spanning the remarkable period of the inception, in the late 1960's and early 1970's, of what is now known as the Standard Model of particle physics and its confirmation by experiments, culminating with the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012.