Marjorie J. Vold was an American chemistry
Background
Marjorie Jean Young was born in 1913 in Ottawa, Ontario, and moved to Mount Hamilton, California as a child, with her parents Reynold and Wilhelmine Aitken Young. Her grandfather Robert Grant Aitken cataloged binary stars at Lick Observatory, and her father also worked an astronomer there.
Education
Young attended the University of California at Berkeley for undergraduate and graduate work, earning her doctorate in 1936.
Career
Her research focused on colloids, and was recognized with a Garvan-Olin Medal from the American Chemical Society in 1967. She did postdoctoral work at Stanford University. Vold moved to southern California in 1941.
She worked as a chemist for Union Oil Company during World World War World War II In 1947 she became a Research Associate at the University of Southern California, and from 1958 until 1974 she held adjunct professor status there.
Her research continued to the end of her life, when she was working from a hospital bed on her final paper on premicelles. She was also named one of the Los Angeles Times "Women of the Year" for 1966.
Vold received a Guggenheim Fellowship to teach in the Netherlands in 1953-1954, the only woman chemist to earn that honor between 1940 and 1970. In 1957, Vold was the first woman to address the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India.