Jane Brown

MA (Cantab), PhD (Cantab) (NC 1951)

College roles

Honorary Fellow (2003)

Biography

Professor Jane Brown is a pioneer in the field of using neutron scattering to investigate the structure of materials and in particular their fundamental magnetic properties, work of great importance in many areas of physics and materials science. She came up to Newnham from Roedean in 1951 and took her PhD in Physics in 1958. She was a DSIR Research Fellow from 1957-1960 and then moved to New York for a two-year appointment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1962 she returned to Newnham as a Fellow and College Lecturer in Physics, and as a Research Assistant and then Assistant Director of Research at the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1974 she was appointed Senior Scientist in charge of the Diffraction Group at the Institut Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, and has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and at Loughborough University.

In 2001 Professor Brown was awarded the Halg/ENSA Prize for outstanding work in neutron scattering, with a long-term impact on scientific and/or technical neutron scattering applications. In 2002 Professor Brown was also awarded the Guthrie Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics, one of its three top awards and the first time any of them has been awarded to a woman. She has continued to research actively since her retirement 20 years ago.