Mary K Gaillard teaching at UC Berkeley in the early 1980s. Courtesy of Emilio Segre archives, LBNL.
Professor Emeritus Mary K Gaillard, a pioneering theoretical physicist and esteemed educator, died on the morning of May 23, 2025. She was 86.
Professor Gaillard was a trailblazer throughout her distinguished career, most notably in 1981 when she became the first woman to join the Physics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Simultaneously, she was appointed a senior staff member at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), later serving as head of its Particle Theory Group from 1985 to 1987. She retired in 2009 but remained active as a professor in the Graduate School at UC Berkeley and as a visiting scientist at Berkeley Lab.
Her career as a theoretical physicist spanned the period from the inception, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of what is now known as the Standard Model of particle physics and its experimental confirmation, culminating with the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012. She taught physics to thousands of students and conducted ground-breaking research in the field of theoretical particle physics. By predicting the mass of the charm quark (with Benjamin W. Lee), 3-jet events (with John Ellis and G.G. Ross), and b-quark mass (with Mike Chanowitz and John Ellis), Mary K blazed a trail of research and discovery. Her significance in the field was recognized through the E.O. Lawrence Memorial Award and the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics. She was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. She served on several committees of the American Physical Society, advisory panels for the Department of Energy and the Unites States National Research Council, and on advisory and visiting committees at universities and national laboratories. She was a member of the National Science Board from 1996 to 2002.
Mary K served as a role model to many female scientists in the Berkeley Physics Department and throughout the world. Throughout her career, she faced widespread gender discrimination on both professional and personal levels. Her perseverance in overcoming prejudices serves as an inspiring model of women in science, for us today and for future generations. When asked once in a public event for advice to young female physicists today on how to navigate those waters she answered: “you just need to love physics enough, for it to be a true passion for you, and keep dismissing all that and just do it, disregard all that nonsense and go ahead with your research’’.
UC Berkeley science writer Robert Sanders interviewed Mary K Gaillard in 2015. The interview, which includes a short video of Mary K, is linked here.