Mary Gaillard, Who Broke a Ceiling in Subatomic Research, Dies at 86

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Science|Mary Gaillard, Who Broke a Ceiling in Subatomic Research, Dies at 86

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/science/mary-k-gaillard-dead.html

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Overcoming discrimination in a mostly male preserve, she did groundbreaking work that showed experimentalist physicists where and how to look for new particles.

A black-and-white photo of a young Mary K Gaillard, with long brown hair, wearing a dark shirt and light-colored scarf, standing in front of a blackboard.

Published July 31, 2025Updated Aug. 1, 2025, 6:21 a.m. ET

Mary K. Gaillard was 16 and still known as Mary Ralph when a boy in her neighborhood asked her what she wanted to do with her life. She told him that she wanted to be a physicist.

“A singularly unfeminine profession,” he replied.

Decades later, that remark would inspire the title of Dr. Gaillard’s memoir, “A Singularly Unfeminine Profession: One Woman’s Journey in Physics” (2015), in which she recounted a career spanning a golden age of particle physics, when the outlines of how nature behaves at subatomic scales were just beginning to emerge.

Dr. Gaillard contributed key insights to what is now known as the Standard Model — scientists’ best theory about the properties and interactions of elementary particles — while overcoming discrimination as one of the few women in her field and inspiring other female physicists to do the same.

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Dr. Gaillard’s 2015 memoir describes a career spanning a golden age of particle physics, when the outlines of how nature behaves at subatomic scales were just beginning to emerge. Credit...World Scientific Press

Physics was “her life,” her son Bruno said. “She was consumed by it.”

Known to many as Mary K, sans period, Dr. Gaillard, who died on May 23 at 86, was the first woman hired by the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley, and later became a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. But much of her groundbreaking work occurred earlier, during a long stint as an unpaid visiting scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, a laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border.

She was “brilliant at doing calculations,” said John Ellis, a physicist at King’s College London, who collaborated with Dr. Gaillard at CERN. “If she calculated something, you could be sure that it was correct.”