Elly Schwab-Agallidis (born Elly Agallidis, el, Έλλη Αγαλλίδου, ; – ) was a

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

physical chemist Physical chemistry is the study of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena in chemical systems in terms of the principles, practices, and concepts of physics such as motion, energy, force, time, thermodynamics, quantum chemistry, statistical me ...

and one of the first women in Greece to be awarded a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in the field. She was the wife of

Georg-Maria Schwab Georg-Maria Schwab (, el, Γεώργιος Σβαμπ; 3 February 1899 – 23 December 1984) was a German-Greek physical chemist recognised for his important contributions in the field of catalysis and the kinetics thereof. Schwab's early acade ...

, who met her in Munich as the supervisor of the experimental work for her doctoral thesis; the couple then worked together as researchers in the Kanellopoulos Institute after they emigrated in Greece. Her most famous work concerned the properties and reactivity of

parahydrogen Molecular hydrogen occurs in two isomeric forms, one with its two proton nuclear spins aligned parallel (orthohydrogen), the other with its two proton spins aligned antiparallel (parahydrogen).P. Atkins and J. de Paula, Atkins' ''Physical Chemist ...

Biography

Elly Agallidis was born in 1914 to a middle class family of Athens; she was the first child of Ioannis Agallidis and Maria-Edith Agallidis (née Zannou). She graduated with a degree in

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

from the

University of Athens The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA; el, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών, ''Ethnikó ke Kapodistriakó Panepistímio Athinón''), usually referred to simply as the Univers ...

in 1934 and continued with postgraduate studies in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory of the

University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's List of universities in Germany, sixth-oldest u ...

, then under the direction of

Heinrich Otto Wieland Heinrich Otto Wieland (; 4 June 1877 – 5 August 1957) was a German chemist. He won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into the bile acids. Career In 1901 Wieland received his doctorate at the University of Munich while studyi ...

. It was there that she met Georg-Maria Schwab, her future husband, who suggested that she examine

and supervised her experimental work. Schwab was banned from teaching in

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

due to his half-Jewish origin. With the increasing fear of prosecution, he decided in 1930 to emigrate to Elly's homeland, Greece. Agallidis and Schwab married in Athens the same year. Schwab-Agallidis was able to find work for both in the chemical laboratory of the

Kanellopoulos Institute of Chemistry and Agriculture The Kanellopoulos Institute of Chemistry and Agriculture (, ) is a former research institute in Piraeus Piraeus ( ; el, Πειραιάς ; grc, Πειραιεύς ) is a port city within the Athens urban area ("Greater Athens"), in the ...

, where the couple collaborated on various topics of physico-chemical research for the next ten years (1939–1949). Among those topics Schwab-Agallidis continued her work on the properties of parahydrogen, for which she received her PhD by the Department of Physics of the University of Athens in 1939 and published multiple relevant papers in the following years. At the same period she also delivered lectures on Physical Chemistry at the University of Athens. After a difficult period for the couple during the Axis occupation of Greece and the resumption of their research after the liberation of Greece, the two scientists eventually returned to

West Germany West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...

when Schwab was offered the Professorship of Physical Chemistry at the University of Munich in 1951. Elly Schwab-Agallidis died in

Essen Essen (; Latin: ''Assindia'') is the central and, after Dortmund, second-largest city of the Ruhr, the largest urban area in Germany. Its population of makes it the fourth-largest city of North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne, Düsseldorf and D ...

at the age of 92 in 2006.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schwab-Agallidis, Elly Greek chemists Greek women chemists 20th-century Greek physicists Greek women physicists 1914 births 2006 deaths Physical chemists Greek emigrants to Germany Scientists from Athens