Women in the IPMB100

Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology.

Last week I presented the IPMB100, a list of the one hundred people who most influenced Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. In that post, I noted that my list contained few women. Because I support diversity, equity, and inclusion—and because students reading IPMB may be wondering where all the women in biological and medical physics are—this week I’d like to explore the contributions of women to IPMB in more detail. My list last week included Marie Curie, Eugenie Mielczarek, Eleanor Adair, and Irene Stegun. What other females might I have added? 

One would be my friend Natalia Trayanova (born 1960?). I collaborated with Trayanova back in the 1990s, when I was at the National Institutes of Health and she was at Duke University. She is cited in IPMB when Russ Hobbie and I discuss the bidomain model of cardiac tissue. She’s been inducted into the Women of Technology International Hall of Fame and has received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Heart Rhythm Society. She’s now on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. 

Another candidate is Rita Hari (born 1948). Russ and I included the biomagnetism researcher Matti Hämäläinen in the IPMB100 list, and Hari is from the same Finnish research group and has made similar contributions as Hämäläinen. She was in fact second author after Hämäläinen on the definitive review article that Russ and I cite about magnetoencephalography (MEG). We cite another paper by Hari when discussing the clinical applications of the MEG.

Bettyann Kevles (1938–2023) was an award-winning author in the Department of History at Yale. Russ and I cite her book Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century when we discuss the history of imaging.

Frances Ashcroft (born 1952) is an Oxford physiologist known for her work on ion channels. Her popular science book The Spark of Life: Electricity and the Human Body is cited in IPMB when Russ and I discuss channelopathies.

I knew Carri Glide-Hurst (born 1979) when she was at Wayne State University here in southeast Michigan. She’s currently associated with the famous University of Wisconsin medical physics program. In IPMB Russ and I cite her Point/Counterpoint article in the journal Medical Physics, which examines the use of ultrasound for breast cancer screening.

Elizabeth Cherry (born 1975?) at Georgia Tech is a biomedical engineer who works on modeling cardiac electrophysiology. She is a co-author on a landmark paper looking at ways to perform low-energy defibrillation.

The contributions of three of my graduate students—Marcella Woods, Debbie Janks, and Debbie Langrill Beaudoin—are honored in IPMB by having their research turned into homework problems. And Russ’s daughter Sarah is cited for her studies on fitting ecological data using exponentials.

Several other women scientists have influenced IPMB but are not explicitly mentioned or cited in the textbook. These include Lisa Meitner (who worked on Auger electrons simultaneously with but independently of Auger); Rosalind Franklin (whose x-ray diffraction data was critical in Watson and Crick’s model of the structure of DNA); Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (another x-ray crystallographer who discovered the structure of penicillin and insulin); Irene Joliot-Curie (a daughter of Marie Curie who, together with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie, discovered induced radioactivity); Rosalyn Yalow (invented the radioimmunoassay); Marie Goeppert Mayer (helped develop the nuclear shell model), Wanda Krassowska (a friend of mine and a colleague of Trayanova’s at Duke University in the 1990s, and who made fundamental contributions to the bidomain model of cardiac tissue); Maria Stuchly (a Polish/Canadian electrical engineer who studied the effect of microwaves on the body); and Marcela Panizza (an Italian clinical neurophysiologist who I collaborated with at NIH when working on magnetic stimulation).

So yes, many females have contributed to IPMB, and could easily have been included in the IPMB100. You could probably name even more. I suspect that future editions of IPMB will feature many more women.