Mary K. Gaillard

Mary K. Gaillard, née Ralph, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and grew up in Painesville, Ohio, where her father taught at Lake Erie College.

She attended Hollins College in Virginia as an undergraduate. During a year abroad study program, she worked in the Louis Leprince-Ringuet laboratory in France, and at Brookhaven National Labs in the summer. After receiving her bachelor's degree from Hollins in 1960, she earned a master's degree from Columbia University in 1961.

At the end of her first year at Columbia, she married Jean-Marc Gaillard, a visiting physics postdoctoral student with whom she would have three children. She moved with him to France, first to the University of Paris at Orsay, and a year later to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Despite experiencing prejudice against women in science, she continued to study theoretical physics, saying, "I became a feminist by necessity." In 1964, she obtained her Doctorat du Troisième Cycle from the University of Paris at Orsay, and in 1968, she completed her Doctorat d'Etat in Theoretical Physics there. In 1979, Dr. Gaillard established a particle theory group at the Laboratoire d'Annecy-le-Vieux de physique des particules (LAPP) in Annecy-le-Vieux. She directed the group from 1979 to 1981 and served as Director of Research for CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) from 1980 to 1981. In 1981, the Gaillards divorced, and she returned to the USA. She joined the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1981, becoming the first woman professor of physics there. At the same time, she was a Faculty Senior Staff member at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she headed the Theory Group from 1985 to 1987. Dr.

Gaillard served on several committees of the American Physical Society, advisory panels for the Department of Energy and the US National Research Council, and on advisory and visiting committees at universities and national laboratories. She was a member of the National Science Board from 1996 to 2002. Her career has spanned the period from the inception in the late 1960s and early 1970s of what is now known as the Standard Model of particle physics and its experimental confirmation, culminating with the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012. Dr. Gaillard's book A Singularly Unfeminine Profession, published in 2015, recounts her experiences as a woman in a very male-dominated field.