Lieselotte Templeton (née Kamm, 4 August 1918 in
Breslau – 10 October 2009 in
Berkeley, California
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...
) was a German-born American
crystallographer.
She received the Patterson Award of the
American Crystallographic Association
The American Crystallographic Association, Inc. (ACA) is a non-profit, scientific organization for scientists who study the structure of matter via crystallographic methodologies. Since its founding in 1949 it has amassed over 2000 members worldwi ...
together with her husband
David H. Templeton in 1987.
Life
Templeton was the daughter of
Berta Kamm (née Stern) and Walter Kamm, and the niece of
Otto Stern
:''Otto Stern was also the pen name of German women's rights activist Louise Otto-Peters (1819–1895)''.
Otto Stern (; 17 February 1888 – 17 August 1969) was a German-American physicist and Nobel laureate in physics. He was the second most n ...
.
She grew up in Germany, fled to France in 1933 and emigrated to the US in 1936.
She received her bachelor's degree and her PhD from
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
in 1946 and 1950, respectively.
Glenn T. Seaborg
Glenn Theodore Seaborg (; April 19, 1912February 25, 1999) was an American chemist whose involvement in the synthesis, discovery and investigation of ten transuranium elements earned him a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His work i ...
was part of the committee for the qualifying examination of her PhD. Her PhD thesis, written under the supervision of
Leo Brewer
Leo Brewer (13 June 1919, St. Louis, Missouri – 22 February 2005, Lafayette, California) was an American physical chemist. Considered to be the founder of modern high-temperature chemistry, Brewer received his BS from the California Institute ...
, was named: "The heats of formation of CN, N
2 and NO".
She was shortly associated with the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States Department of Energy National Labs, United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, t ...
and later worked as a research scientist for the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
.
In 1948, she married
David H. Templeton and had two children with him.
Due to anti-nepotism rules, she was sometimes not allowed to work in the same department as her husband.
Research
After her PhD, she worked on solid-state chemistry, ceramics, and the detection of explosives.
Her research in crystallography started with her work on the analytical absorption program (AGNOST), later called ABSOR.
This program helped solving several crystal structures of heavy-element compounds and was also important for her studies on anomalous dispersion with synchrotron radiation on absorption edges which she performed jointly with
David H. Templeton.
This led to the development of the
multi-wavelength anomalous diffraction phasing, now a standard method for protein structure analysis.
Together with David H. Templeton, she also used the polarized nature of synchrotron radiation to show X-ray dichroism in anisotropic molecules and to measure the polarized anomalous scattering in diffraction experiments for the first time.
Selected publications
Three of her most important publications on anamalous dispersion of absorption edges with synchrotron radiation:
*
*
*
Two of her publications on X-ray dichroism in anisotropic molecules:
*
*
Awards
She received the Patterson Award of the
American Crystallographic Association
The American Crystallographic Association, Inc. (ACA) is a non-profit, scientific organization for scientists who study the structure of matter via crystallographic methodologies. Since its founding in 1949 it has amassed over 2000 members worldwi ...
jointly with her husband
David H. Templeton in 1987 for their discoveries regarding use, measurement, and analysis of anomalous X-ray scattering.
Lieselotte Templeton Prize for Students
The German Society for Crystallography (DGK) awards the Lieselotte Templeton Prize to students who have written an excellent Bachelor's or Master's thesis in the field of
crystallography
Crystallography is the experimental science of determining the arrangement of atoms in crystalline solids. Crystallography is a fundamental subject in the fields of materials science and solid-state physics (condensed matter physics). The wor ...
.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Templeton, Lieselotte
2009 deaths
1918 births
American crystallographers
German emigrants to the United States