Nuclear physicist Melba Newell Phillips was born #OTD in 1907. Author of two standard textbooks and numerous articles on physics history, she worked tirelessly to promote the teaching of physics as an AAPT member.
Image: Ellen and John Vinson, in https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-007-0373-z

Phillips was born in Indiana, and did a Masters in Physics at Battle Creek College in Michigan. She taught there for a few years before going to UC Berkeley for her PhD. She worked with Robert Oppenheimer — one of his first graduate students — and received her doctorate in 1933.

Together they discovered the Oppenheimer-Phillips process, where a passing deuteron is polarized by the electrostatic field of a nucleus. The deuteron’s proton is repelled, allowing the nucleus to capture the neutron and form a heavier isotope.
http://libkey.io/10.1103/PhysRev.48.500

Phillips went on to work at Bryn Mawr, and spent a year as a Margaret Maltby fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. After that it was the Connecticut College for Women, Brooklyn College, the University of Minnesota, and the Harvard Radio Research Laboratory during the war.

After the war, Melba Newell Phillips became a professor at Brooklyn College and also worked at the Columbia University Radiation Laboratory.

Both institutions fired her in 1952 when she refused to testify against her colleagues during McCarthy's witch hunts.

Here is the summons sent to Phillips, ordering her to appear before the McCarran Committee.

Image: Box 1, Folder 1, Melba Phillips papers / AIP
https://repository.aip.org/islandora/object/nbla:285524#page/45/mode/1up

Melba Phillips remained unemployed for five years, but managed to remain active writing textbooks and papers. She eventually found a new position at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1962 she moved to U Chicago and stayed there until 1972, when she took emeritus status.

Melba Newell Phillips was a renowned teacher. She joined the American Association of Physics Teachers ( @AAPTHQ) in 1943, and in 1966 became the first woman elected as its president. The AAPT established the Melba Newell Phillips Medal in her honor in 1981.

The AIP has an excellent oral history interview with Melba Newell Phillips. Katherine Sopka spoke with her in 1977. https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4821

Sopka raises the issue of how colleagues responded to Melba Phillips being targeted by the McCarran Committee in 1952.