Gabrielle Donnay

Gabrielle Donnay, née Hamburger (21 March 1920 – 4 April 1987), was a German-born American crystallographer and historian of science.^[1]

Gabrielle Donnay
Born	(1920-03-21)21 March 1920 Landeshut, Germany (now Kamienna Góra, Poland)
Died	4 April 1987(1987-04-04) (aged 67)
Nationality	American
Alma mater	UCLA (B.A.) MIT (Ph.D)
Known for	Crystal Data
Spouse	Joseph Donnay
Awards	Past Presidents’ Medal of the Mineralogical Association of Canada
Scientific career
Fields	Crystallography
Institutions	Carnegie Institution of Washington United States Geological Survey McGill University

Life

Gabrielle Donnay was born in Landeshut, Germany (now Kamienna Góra, Poland) on 21 March 1920 and emigrated to the United States in 1937.^[2] She received her B.A. from UCLA with highest honors in chemistry in 1941 and was awarded her Ph.D in 1949 from MIT. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University from 1949-1950. In 1949, she met and married Joseph (Jose) Donnay, a professor of crystallography and mineralogy at Johns Hopkins University.^[3] In 1950, she joined the staff of the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where she worked until 1969.^[3] She had concurrent position at the U.S. Geological Survey from 1952-1955.^[3] She was a professor in crystallography at McGill University in Montreal from 1970 to 1981.^[4] She died on 4 April 1987 near Mont St-Hilaire, Quebec.^[2]

Activities and Achievements

Her interest in tourmaline turned out to be a career long interest. Her paper, co-authored with M.J. Buerger, The Determination of the Crystal Structure of Tourmaline^[5] led to 13 more papers on the same topic, including a definitive 1977 paper on the structural mechanism of pyroelectricity in tourmaline.^[6]

She and her husband frequently collaborated and they published two editions of "Crystal Data" in 1954 and 1963 to compile the research of all crystallographers. Her area of expertise was in crystal chemistry and structural crystallography. She published more than 134 papers in her lifetime, almost half of which were collaborative projects with her husband.^[7]

Donnay published Laboratory Manual in Crystallography based on her classes at McGill University. She also published Women in the Geological Sciences in Canada in an effort correct the injustices that she experienced in the male-dominated field of geology.^[2] She was awarded the Past Presidents’ Medal of the Mineralogical Association of Canada in 1983.^[2] She was the first women named to the John Hopkins Society of Scholar.^[3] The mineral donnayite is named after her and Jose Donnay^[2] and the mineral species Gaidonnayite is named after her.^[7][8][9]