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Lise Meitner Professorship

The Lise Meitner Professorship is an appointment in which a leading female researcher is nominated to work at the faculty as a visiting professor for a period of one to three years, and act as a role model for other women at LTH. The professorship was established on 1 January 1999.

Who is eligible?

The nominated candidate must be a professor at their own university, or fulfil the requirements for a professorship and have an employment with an external organisation. It is important that the nominee has the necessary attributes to actively participate in teaching at first, second and third-cycle levels, and in other activities at the host department. It is also desirable that the nominee takes part in lectures and seminars at both the host and other departments at LTH, as well as in internal and external faculty-wide activities. The appointment is a part time (20% of a full-time) fixed term position at LTH and can be held for a period of three years.

New recruitments to the Lise Meitner professorship are made on an annual basis since 2018, the invitation to nominate candidates for the professorship usually goes out to all departments at the end of each year. 

Contact person: Jeffrey Armstrong

Lise Meitner. Photo.

Who was Lise Meitner?

Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist and the first person to identify the phenomenon of nuclear fission. Born in Vienna, she studied at the universities of Vienna and Berlin. Together with the German chemist Otto Hahn, she was involved in the discovery of the element protactinium in 1918. She was a professor at the University of Berlin from 1926-1933.

Lise Meitner, who was of Jewish decent, was forced to flee the Nazi regime in Germany in 1938, taking with her only a few personal belongings in a small suitcase and a wealth of research experience, including as head of the Department of Physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Having found asylum in Stockholm, she joined the atomic physicists conducting research at Stockholm University. She published her first article on nuclear fission in 1939 and is also renowned for her research into atomic theory and radioactivity. She predicted the occurrence of the chain reaction that contributed to the development of the atomic bomb. In 1946, she held a position as a visiting professor at the Catholic University in Washington DC, and returned to the United States in 1959 to teach at Bryn Mawr College.

In 1966, she was jointly awarded the Enrico Fermi Award together with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman for their work paving the way for the discovery of nuclear fission in uranium. She died in Cambridge in 1968.

Page Manager: webbredaktion@lth.lu.se | 2020-12-09