Jenny Rosenthal Bramley was a Russian-born American physicist. She was the first woman to earn a doctorate in physics from an American institution, and she was the second woman elected as a fellow of the IEEE. She holds numerous patents on Electroluminescence and Electro-optics and is cited by the IEEE as being "well known for her innovative work in lasers.”
Personal life
Bramley was born Jenny Rosenthal in Moscow on July 31, 1909. Her parents were Lithuanian, and she and her family left Russia as part of a hostage exchange between Lithuania and the Soviet Union. She attended high school in Berlin and earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Paris in 1926 at age 16. She spoke English, Russian, French, and German and used her translation skills many times at professional meetings and to translate technical articles. Bramley received both a master's degree in 1927 and a doctorate in 1929 at age 19 from New York University. University officials at NYU said she became the first woman to receive a Ph.D in physics from an American institution. Bramley met her husband, Dr. Arthur Bramley, while working as a physicist at the United States Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratory in Belmar, NJ. She died on May 26, 1997 at age 87 in Lancaster, PA, and is survived by a daughter, son, eleven grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.
Career
After graduating from New York University Bramley did research at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan before teaching at Brooklyn College and New York University. Along with Gregory Breit, Bramley was the first to calculate the effect of extended nuclear charge on hyperfine structure and isotopic shift – an effect still known as the Breit-Rosenthal correction. She contributed to a number of other fields including applying electroluminescence to solid state displays and storage devices and developing high efficiency lasers. Bramley also invented coding techniques and methods of decoding pictorial information, later used in classified studies. During World War II Bramley conducted some research in secret which she was unable to publish at the time. In the 1950s she worked at Monmouth Junior College where she served as head of the mathematics department.
