PSU Magazine Fall 2013

a male was hired. Rempfer still recalls the given rationale: women should not take jobs away from men. The irony was that in those days women's colleges were about the only higher education institution that would hire women. ~ ith the advent of World War lU II, Rempfer went to work in industry, where she met and wed Robert "Bob" Rempfer, the late PSU professor of mathematics. In 1951, with three children, she and Bob moved to Ohio where he was to teach math at Antioch College. It was the age of McCarthyism, and what Rempfer calls "troublous times." Anti– och students were supportive of their liberal faculty, but the administration was not. The Rempfers left to teach at Fisk, a historically black institution, where they stayed for four years, again earning the trust and respect of the students and the opposition of the administration for their support of racial integration. Today in her laboratory Gert proudly displays a plaque, which the Fisk Board of Trustees presented to the Rempfers in 1996 commending their stands. "You see," she explains with a smile, "some of our former students are now on the board." From 1961 until her reluctant retirement at age 65, Rempfer worked one day a week at Tektronix while on the PSU physics faculty. Rempfer con– tinues to work with graduate students, reading drafts of their theses and shar- Deborah Duffield ing her knowledge. At the conclusion of her day's work, she takes the bus back to Forest Grove and her beloved farm, where she still lifts SO-pound sacks of feed. Deborah Duffield, professor of biology, sees herself as a transitional figure among women in the sciences at Portland State. When she was hired in 1978 with a Ph.D. in genetics from UCLA, she was certainly equal to the men in her field in education and seri– ousness of research, but there were few women in her cohort. "As a woman, I went my own way professionally," remembers Duffield, "though at profes– sional meetings I was aware that I was one of the few women who stood up and gave talks." With a father who designed med– ical equipment and a mother who was a medical technician, it is not surpris– ing that Duffield's original career choice was medicine. She became dis– couraged by the impersonality she saw in the field, and she shifted gears to biology, earning a bachelor's from Pomona College in 1963 and a mas– ter's from Stanford University in 1966. Her interest in genetics led her to Stanford for the opportunity to work with marine mammals and in evolu– tionary biology. At the time, this was not a mainstream field of interest in biology, but that meant Duffield could carve her own niche. "Coming in the back door allowed me to do what really excited me," she says. When Duffield came to Portland in 1977, she and her husband, Stan Hill– man, also a PSU professor of biology, had two young children. Duffield held a research position at Oregon Health & Science University for a year, and FALL 2001 PSU MAGAZINE 7