Megaw honored

Helen Megaw (who celebrates her 94th birthday in 2001) received an honorary degree from Queen's U., Belfast, Northern Ireland, July 7, 2000. Dr. Megaw, a native of Northern Ireland, attended Queen's before earning BA and PhD degrees from the U. of Cambridge. One of the pioneers in the field of crystallography, her PhD concerned the structure of ice. After postdoctoral work in Vienna and Oxford, she taught in girls' schools in England and worked in an industrial research laboratory. After the second world war she worked in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge on ferroelectric crystals, wrote the book 'Ferroelectricity in Crystals', and did pioneering work on disorder in crystals and its effect on the x-ray diffraction patterns. She was awarded the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 1989. An island in the Antarctic is named after her in recognition of her work on ice. She returned to Northern Ireland when she retired from the University of Cambridge in 1972. Further information can be found in the American Inst. of Physics History of Physics web pages www.aip.org/history.