PSU Magazine Fall 1990

A career in focus This August, Dr. Gertrude Rempfer, professor emerita of physics at PSU, received the 1990 Distinguished Scientist Award from the Electron Microscopy Society ofAmerica, honoring her lifetime of research in the physi– cal sciences. By Par Seo(( A t age 78, Gert Rempfer is a small , seemingly frail woman , with a heart as big as an overstuffed chair, principl es as staunch as steel, and a mind fed by complex sc ientific formulae and yet cravi ng more. She taught actively at PSU for over 20 years, and for more th an 40 years she has been one of the few sc ienti sts work ing in the field of electron microscopy and electron optics. Rempfer lives with her husband Robert, professor emeritus of mathematics at PSU, on eight acres near Forest Grove, Ore., with dogs, cats, ducks, horses, and peacoc ks. Though retired from classroom teaching since 1979, Rempfer's research activities have left her little free time. "There's so much that needs to be done at home, like keeping up the fences," she says ruefully. "Sometimes I hire people; otherwise I do it," she comments on her fence-mending and other chores. " I' m good at it. And I' m not a bad carpenter ei ther. Usi ng your brain, then using your muscles; it 's a nice balance." Despite years spent in the confines of classroom and lab, Rempfer says she has always been an outdoors person. She still rides horses when she can find the time, and is a former mountain climber. Originally, she was a forestry major at Un iversity of Washington (where she did her graduate and undergraduate work) until she hit a snag. " It was spring term of my sophomore year and I was fit as anybody; fit as any of the men-folk ," Rempfer reca ll s. "Well , in order to be a forestry major you had to spend time at a logging camp, but they didn't have facilities for women. So that 's when I got run out of the program." Her career in forestry ended, but Gert didn't put up much of a fu ss. By th at time her interests had changed to mathematics and physics ... where she di scovered other obstacles. "When I was in my teens, it used to bother me that people would say women weren't meant to be scientists," Rempfer remembers. "'After all , look how few there are,' they would say. It was humiliating. But after a while, I realized that women hadn ' t been allowed to go to universities; that they had to find a pl ace to work at the sufferance of some male professor - hidden away , you couldn 't be in with the other researchers. Women didn't have a chance to be sc ientists," she says adamantly. "But once I realized there was nothing wrong with us women, I could put up with whatever barriers soc iety might PSU 15