Rosalyn (Sussman) Yalow - Developer of RIA
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By her own account, Yalow was a headstrong child with an early love for books. She could read before she entered kindergarten. She remembers her older brother, Alexander, leading their way to the library every week to return books and check out more.
Yalow's early interests were mathematics and chemistry. While attending Hunter College, she was drawn to physics. She remembers reading the-then new biography by Eve Curie of her mother, Marie Curie, and hearing Enrico Fermi lecture on nuclear fission.
While her parents thought a career as a teacher was the best route to follow, Yalow longed for graduate studies in physics. Lacking finances but receiving strong encouragement from her professors, Yalow persisted. Shortly after graduating in 1941 she received a teaching assistantship at the University of Illinois. Her three and one-half years in Illinois were the only time she lived outside of New York City.
Yalow remembers being the only woman faculty member of the College of Engineering at Illinois when she began teaching. She says she believes the number of men being drafted into the armed forces (just prior to the US involvement in World War II) provided her with the opportunity to teach and do graduate work. She met and married Aaron Yalow (1943) at Illinois. Aaron Yalow was studying medical physics.
Yalow found that her training at Hunter College had not prepared her for graduate work. She continued to take undergraduate courses to catch up. She sat in on classes to observe how experienced teachers taught. And she handled her own studies and taught undergraduate classes.
Her inborn stubborn nature proved an advantage when a professor noted that her A-minus grade in an optics laboratory class proved that "women to do not well at laboratory work." This was a call to her persistence and perseverance.
Yalow completed her Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics in 1945. She credits her thesis sponsor, Dr. Maurice Goldhaber, and his wife, Dr. Gertrude Goldhaber, for their encouragement and support.
Yalow's husband had not yet completed his thesis, so she returned to New York alone and worked as a research engineer at the Federal Telecommunications Laboratory. The laboratory was soon relocated and Yalow then accepted a position teaching physics at Hunter College; the formerly all-women's college now accepted men -- veterans taking engineering courses.
