Arlene Judith Lennox (1942–2008) was an American

medical physicist A medical physicist is a health professional with specialist education and training in the concepts and techniques of applying physics in medicine and competent to practice independently in one or more of the subfields (specialties) of medical phys ...

. Known for her work on neutron therapy for cancer patients at

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been opera ...

, she became "one of the world's experts on neutron therapy", and her work was featured in the 2009 documentary ''The Matter of Everything''.

Education and career

Lennox was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She was educated at an all-girl Catholic high school, entered a convent as a novitiate at age 14, finished high school at age 15, and became an undergraduate at

Notre Dame College Notre Dame College (Notre Dame College of Ohio or NDC) is a private Roman Catholic college in South Euclid, Ohio. Established in 1922 as a women's college, it has been coeducational since January 2001. Notre Dame College offers 30 majors and i ...

in Ohio at age 16. She studied there to become a high school mathematics and science teacher, and taught for six years, beginning at age 17. She spent the last two summers of this period studying for a master's degree at the

University of Notre Dame The University of Notre Dame du Lac, known simply as Notre Dame ( ) or ND, is a private Catholic university, Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend, Indiana, South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin fo ...

in Indiana, supported by a

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

program aimed at improving the quality of national science education. She was invited to continue at the University of Notre Dame as a doctoral student, becoming the only woman in her class and one of only two women in the physics program there. Her doctoral research was performed in collaboration with the Argonne National Laboratory. After completing her doctorate she came to Fermilab as a postdoctoral researcher in 1974, and ended up spending the rest of her career there, asking to be released from her vows when her order tried to reassign her to other duties in 1976. From 1974 to 1985 she worked on basic physics as part of the development of a

lithium Lithium (from el, λίθος, lithos, lit=stone) is a chemical element with the symbol Li and atomic number 3. It is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal. Under standard conditions, it is the least dense metal and the least dense solid ...

lens, used to focus

antiproton The antiproton, , (pronounced ''p-bar'') is the antiparticle of the proton. Antiprotons are stable, but they are typically short-lived, since any collision with a proton will cause both particles to be annihilated in a burst of energy. The exis ...

s as part of the development of an

source at the laboratory. In 1985, that project was completed, and in the same year, the laboratory's neutron therapy facility, founded in 1976, shifted focus from a grant-funded research facility to a fee-based medical facility; as part of a major reorganization at the laboratory, she was reassigned to be a manager and medical physicist at the neutron therapy facility. She continued there, becoming head of the program, until retiring shortly before her death.

Recognition

In 2003, Lennox was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) "for her leadership in the field of neutron therapy".

Personal life

Lennox married David P. Eartly, another Fermilab physicist, in 1977. She died of

breast cancer Breast cancer is cancer that develops from breast tissue. Signs of breast cancer may include a lump in the breast, a change in breast shape, dimpling of the skin, milk rejection, fluid coming from the nipple, a newly inverted nipple, or a r ...

on May 24, 2008.

References

External links

Photo of Lennox lecturing at a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Physics Department Colloquium
Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, American Institute of Physics {{DEFAULTSORT:Lennox, Arlene 1942 births 2008 deaths American physicists American women physicists Medical physicists Notre Dame College (Ohio) alumni University of Notre Dame alumni People associated with Fermilab Fellows of the American Physical Society 21st-century American women Physicists from Ohio