Joan Freeman (4) (1918–1998)

Joan Freeman was born in Perth, Australia, and moved with her family to Sydney as a small child. Although her father lost his job at the start of the Great Depression, her mother scraped up the fees for Joan to attend the prestigious Sydney Church of England Girls School. A prize-winning pupil, Joan also took evening classes as the lone girl at Sydney Technical College -- a fact the administrators hid from school inspectors, as they thought it would reflect negatively on the college. In 1936, she enrolled at the University of Sydney, where she studied mathematics, chemistry, physics and zoology, and was often the only woman in the lecture hall. She received her BSc with a double first in 1940 and was awarded a scholarship to earn a MSc degree. In 1941, she got a job as a research officer with the Radiophysics Laboratory of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and worked on the new technology of radar during World War II. After the war, she received a CSIR scholarship that allowed her to read for her PhD at the University of Cambridge in England.

In 1951, Dr. Freeman became Senior Scientific Officer at the British Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, where she spent most of her working life. She eventually led the Tandem Accelerator Group. In 1958, she married John Jelley, whom she had met at Harwell. She received the Rutherford Medal from the British Institute of Physics in 1976 with Roger Blin-Stoyle, the first woman to do so, for their work on the beta-radioactivity of complex nuclei. She was a elected to fellowship in the Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society. After retirement, she wrote her autobiography, book A Passion for Physics (1991).