Meet the Archives Fellow Enriching the Historical Record of Women in the Physical Sciences

In July 2025, AIP started an initiative to improve the documentation and contributions of women in the physical sciences. With the help of the Henry Luce Foundation, the project is underway and I’m very excited to be working with the Niels Bohr Library & Archives (NBLA) team as the newly minted Archives Fellow.

As the fellow, I’m tasked with improving the historical record of women in the physical sciences across a variety of areas. I am conducting archival research and identifying stories that forefront women scientists’ experiences in their professional, academic, and personal lives. This will take the form of blog posts and social media posts, highlighting themes and through lines across NBLA’s oral history and archival collections. I am also enhancing the oral history collection by conducting new oral history interviews with scientists at various stages in their careers. Lastly, I am supporting NBLA’s ongoing outreach endeavors, such as participating in Wikipedia edit-a-thons to improve and promote historical information about women in the physical sciences and their discoveries in the field.

A bit about me

I recently completed my Master of Library and Information Science program at the University of Maryland, with a focus in Archives and Digital Curation. An enduring dimension of my work has been audio storytelling, as I come from a community archives background and specialize in oral histories. Prior to entering archives, I worked in independent broadcast journalism.

As an archivist, some of my interests include people-centered narratives, information and power, digital cultural memory, scent and memory, and reparative archival work. I’m deeply fascinated with the past, meaning making, and how structures of power and knowledge shape our realities and how we relate to each other and ourselves.

What I’m excited about

With the guidance of AIP historians Anna Doel and Jon Phillips, I’m learning more about interviewing scientists and history of science approaches to storytelling. I’ve interviewed a variety of people such as activists, humanities professors, authors and more, yet somehow I’ve never done an oral history with a physicist, so I’m eager for the opportunity to do so!

I’ve also started doing some research by going through AIP’s existing collection of over 1500 oral history transcripts and looking for threads across interviews or over an individual scientist’s life. I’m especially interested in personal narratives and themes such as mentorship and peer networks, motherhood and family building, philosophy and science, and other motifs that give insight to women scientists’ interior lives, in addition to their intellectual contributions.

I’m also particularly interested in archival research and understanding the past through the lens of scent. We live in an ocularcentric and text-heavy world, and I’m really curious about the kind of information we can glean from engaging with our other senses such as smell and touch. What can we learn by smelling with intention? How can an olfactive lens enrich our understanding of human experiences within the archival record? I’d like to bring this sensorial approach to information gathering into my research and oral history interviewing—I can’t wait to see where it goes.

Current musings

One of the first oral history interviews I delved into was that of renowned astrophysicist Sandra Faber. She is one of the few women scientists that AIP was able to interview repeatedly over the years. Over her career, AIP interviewed her three times—in 1988 , 2002 , and 2020 . I am especially interested in seeing if upon reflection, there were any major changes in how she understood her experiences in grad school and various institutions, as each interview was conducted across various stages in her career.

I came across what I found to be quite a delightful description of Faber’s relationship to the cosmos, as mediated by the telescope. In the 2002 interview with historian W. Patrick McCray, Faber recalls her earlier experiences at Lick Observatory and describes her love for observing:

Faber:
Oh, I love observing. Observing is addictive. Yeah. The image dissector scanner especially was very nice because you could see the data as they built up. Not like a CCD detector of today in which you expose and then you read out and only then can you look at it. But you could see it. You could see it coming and you could stop when you were satisfied. It was wonderful. And we got a lot of our results, especially Alan Dressler and I later, when we did a radial velocity program. We could measure the radio velocities right on the little cathode ray screen. We’d see the spectral shift and say, “Wow! That one’s in the cluster, that one’s not in the cluster.” So there was a lot of immediate reward. I like being alone with the telescope at night. It’s almost a mystical experience. You sort of feel special. Everybody else is sleeping, you’re awake, you’re communing with the universe and these peons, these pedestrians are–

McCray:
Are sleeping.

Faber:
Are sleeping. [laughs] Right. I like the thought that – this is a wonderful thing about observing – the universe is so full of so many different objects. In my case it has been true. I am looking at things that nobody has ever looked at before. I like that feeling. I am the first person in the history of the human race to make this observation – small as it might be, just one more spectrum. Nevertheless, nobody has ever done that before. I like the thought of somebody looking back. Who am I really looking at when I look at this galaxy? So these thoughts run through my mind, but basically it’s very satisfying. It’s also – to do it well demands total concentration, so there is also the kind of climbing a mountain peak aspect to it. You forget the rest of the world, because you have to. You have to be completely focused.

Though Faber describes a satisfying sense of solitude when observing, it’s the communion with the stars and building a relationship with the universe that she later develops into a concept of how understanding astronomy is part of being a responsible Earth citizen. Later in the interview, she describes the necessity of grasping the scale of human activity on Earth in relation to the rest of the universe. In her public speaking and efforts to demonstrate the relevance of astronomical knowledge to the public, she weaves together astronomy, philosophy, and social responsibility and eventually arrives at the concept of cosmic knowledge, which she describes in more detail in her 2020 interview .

* * *

My blog posts over the next year will cover a variety of topics, from more in-depth histories of how mentorship and networks sustained interviewees’ love of science to interesting stories I come across in NBLA’s collections. The blog posts will also double as a log of my research and learnings as a fellow. Generally, I will post every other month, so I hope you follow me on my research journey!

Further Readings

• Interview of Sandra Faber by Alan P. Lightman on October 15, 1988, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, [https://doi.org/10.1063/nbla.jvyb.uewd ]
• Interview of Sandra Faber by W. Patrick McCray on July 31, 2002, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, [https://doi.org/10.1063/nbla.euqq.swzi ]
• Interview of Sandra Faber by David Zierler on November 12, 2020, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, [https://doi.org/10.1063/nbla.hjlu.hsgl ]