Early Career Prize for the History of Physics for 2024

Dr. Joanna Behrman

“The 2024 IUPAP Early Career Prize in the History of Physics recognizes Dr Joanna Behrman’s pioneering research in the history of women in physics, alongside her extensive work communicating the history of physics to public audiences and extensive service and institution building on behalf of the history of physics community.”

While completing her A.B. in physics at Harvard University, Joanna Behrman became interested in the history of physics education and how it had differed for women and men. She decided to pursue this interest in the history of science, earning a M.A. in social sciences from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in 2020 from Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation, conducted under Joris Mercelis, investigated the history of female physicists at U.S. women's colleges. Her research revealed a vibrant community of female physicists prior to the Second World War. She also demonstrated that recentering the history of physics from the perspective of female practitioners offers a distinctly different history of the physics profession. After her graduate studies, Joanna worked for three years as a public historian at the American Institute of Physics, where she was in charge of various educational and outreach programs at the Center for History of Physics. Since late 2024, she has been a postdoc at the Department of Science Education at the University of Copenhagen with Adrienne Traxler. She is currently working on a bipartite network analysis of historical women in physics, using both individuals and institutions as nodes. She is also writing a monograph on the history of U.S. women in physics, under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Pr