Julia Weertman, PhD
Julia Weertman (1926-2018) earned her bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees and was the first woman to do so at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1972, Dr. Weertman became an assistant professor in Northwestern’s material science and engineering department after first traveling to Evanston with her family in 1959 when her husband became an associate professor at the university.
Dr. Weertman was the first woman on the Northwestern faculty in the material science department, and later in 1987, when she was appointed chair of the department, she became the first women in the United States to hold a chair position in an engineering department. While at NU, she and her husband co-authored the 1964 textbook, Elementary Dislocation Theory (Reprint, Oxford University Press, 1992).
Photo courtesy of Northwestern University Archives