The Irish 'research lady' who helped win the Nobel

Dubliner Anne Kernan was involved in the Cern research that won a Nobel Prize, yet her work is little known here now, writes JOANNE HUNT

‘RESEARCH LADY” is the chosen e-mail nickname of 77-year-old Anne Kernan, but as one of the physicists whose work led to a discovery that won a Nobel Prize, it is a title that’s far too modest.

She was part of the team that found two sub-atomic particles, the Z and W bosons, research that captured the 1984 Nobel Prize in physics for team leader Carlo Rubbia and his partner Simon van der Meer. The two were physicists at the Cern high-energy research centre near Geneva where Kernan spent the best part of her research career.

Now retired and living in Massachusetts, this Dublin woman’s scholarship in physics spans four decades in which she’s worked at all of the world’s principle high-energy physics research centres, including Cern, the Linear Accelerator at Stanford and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago.

These facilities, sometimes called atom-smashers, study the extremely high-speed collisions of small particles of matter, in search of the fundamental particles of which everything is made. Kernan was in the thick of it.

Born in Dublin in 1933, Kernan dates her love of science back to childhood. “As a little girl during the war years, everyone was talking about Oppenheimer, splitting the atom and the atomic bomb. I was curious about all of that. None of my family was involved in science but my mother and father read widely and discussed everything,” she says.

When it came to secondary school, Kernan specifically sought out the Dominican College on Eccles Street, Dublin. “Some schools didn’t teach physics to girls, but this one did,” she says.

Kernan went on to study science at UCD. “I knew I wanted to specialise in physics after the first year. My course adviser did his best to discourage me at first – maybe he didn’t have a great opinion of what women could achieve in the field, but I wasn’t deterred.”

Kernan was only 19 when she got her undergraduate degree– the only woman in her 1952 graduating class. At 24, she’d earned her PhD.

After four years lecturing at UCD, she got itchy feet and won a scholarship for postdoctoral research at Berkeley in California.

So were there more women in physics in the US? “There were even fewer women, in fact,” she says. “Women were encouraged more towards biology. I found it more sexist at Berkeley, to be honest. I didn’t have any problems at all, but they were surprised by me, I think.”

Kernan next moved to the Linear Accelerator Centre at Stanford for a year and, in 1967, she was awarded an associate professorship at the University of California, Riverside. She was just 34.

So what was campus life like in the US in the 1960s? “Overall, I don’t think women were as liberated there as they were in Europe. I think the US was more conservative in some respects. American women married in their early 20s and had kids. They weren’t all going to hops like we were in Ireland.”

At Riverside, Kernan lectured in all areas of physics while pursuing her own research into elementary particles – the search for the ultimate constituents of matter and the forces that bind them. But by 1981 she was restless again and she headed for Geneva, where the lab at Cern housed the highest-energy accelerator in the world. Another scientist called Carlo Rubbia was already there.

“I signed up to work with a research group on photographic emulsions, but when I saw the work Carlo was doing, I switched. “Carlo was so brilliant and dynamic. The work in his research group was exciting, it was a great feeling to be part of that.”

Her connection with Cern was to continue for the rest of her career. She was to spend half of her time lecturing at Riverside and the rest researching in Geneva.

In 1983, Kernan lead the US team on the multinational experiment at Cern which discovered the W and Z . In recognition of her contribution, Kernan was invited to the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm and her work is well acknowledged in Rubbia’s research papers. Not bad for the girl from Griffith Avenue.

Now retired, Kernan remains dean emeritus at Riverside and has a string of fellowships and honours to her name.

"I still read Physics Todayand keep up with what the team at UCD is doing at Cern," she says. "I'm glad the college continues to have strong associations there."