Pioneering theoretical physicist Mary K. Gaillard has died at 86

Mary K. Gaillard, a theoretical physicist whose calculations of the properties of new elementary particles helped validate the Standard Model of physics in the 1970s, died on May 23 of natural causes at her home in Berkeley. A UC Berkeley professor emerita of physics and faculty senior scientist emerita at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she was 86.

Gaillard knew she wanted to be a physicist since she was a teenager and pursued that dream despite the fact that women in the 1960s and ’70s were not always welcome in the field. Following her physicist husband to Paris, France, in 1961, she set out to pursue her doctorate, but was rejected as a graduate student by numerous male scientists who told her that women could not do physics.