Aafje Looijenga-Vos (29 April 1928 in

Marum Marum () is a town and a former municipality in the northeastern Netherlands. The municipality was merged into the municipality of Westerkwartier on 1 January 2019. History Marum is located in the peat area, and was an agricultural village. It ...

– 4 November 2018 in

Amersfoort Amersfoort () is a city and municipality in the province of Utrecht, Netherlands, about 20 km from the city of Utrecht and 40 km south east of Amsterdam. As of 1 December 2021, the municipality had a population of 158,531, making it the second- ...

) was a Dutch crystallographer. She was a professor for general chemistry and later for structural chemistry at the

University of Groningen The University of Groningen (abbreviated as UG; nl, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, abbreviated as RUG) is a Public university#Continental Europe, public research university of more than 30,000 students in the city of Groningen (city), Groningen in ...

Life

She studied chemistry at the University of Groningen from 1946 to 1952. Already in 1948, she met other crystallographers during the first Congress of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). In 1952, she started her PhD in the group of the

Eelco Wiebenga Eelco is a given name. Notable people with the name include: *Eelco Gelling (born 1946), Dutch blues guitarist * Eelco Horsten (born 1989), Dutch professional footballer * Eelco Jansen (born 1969), Dutch baseball player * Eelco Sintnicolaas (born 1 ...

. Her PhD thesis dealt with the structures of P₄S₁₀ and P₄S₇ and was named "De kristalstructuur van P₄S₁₀ and P₄S₇ ". She defended the thesis in 1955. The first two years after defending her thesis, she worked at UK crystallographic institutions (Glasgow, Leeds, Oxford, and Cambridge), where she also worked with

Dorothy Hodgkin Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (née Crowfoot; 12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994) was a Nobel Prize-winning British chemist who advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of biomolecules, which became essential fo ...

. In 1962, she became a professor for general chemistry and, in 1967, she became a professor of structural chemistry at the

. She was the secretary of the IUCr Commission on the International Tables and was involved in realising the 1983 edition of Volume A of the ''International Tables for Crystallography.'' In 1982, she married Hans Looijenga, a widower with eight children. She was survived by 21 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren.

Research

Together with Philip Coppens, she performed neutron diffraction experiments on cyanuric acid crystals. She also worked on direct methods together with

Isabella Karle Isabella Karle (December 2, 1921 – October 3, 2017) was an American chemist who was instrumental in developing techniques to extract plutonium chloride from a mixture containing plutonium oxide. For her scientific work, Karle received the Garva ...

. She was also involved in the development of the CAD-4, the ''C''omputer ''A''utomated ''D''iffractometer with ''4'' circles. Furthermore, her research dealt with the following topics: cyclophosphazenes, electron-density distribution studies based on high-resolution data at low temperature, and relations between structure and both electrical and magnetic properties of morpholinium-TCNQ compounds.

Selected publications

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Awards

Since 1980, she was a member of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Looijenga-Vos, Aafje 1928 births 2018 deaths University of Groningen alumni People from Marum Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences 20th-century Dutch chemists Dutch women chemists Academic staff of the University of Groningen 20th-century Dutch women scientists