Pauline Morrow Austin
American physicist and meteorologist (1916-2011)
Pauline "Polly" Morrow Austin (December 18, 1916 – August 29, 2011) was an American physicist and meteorologist known for her work on weather radar.
Early life and education
Austin (nee Pauline Morrow) was born in 1916 in Kingsville, Texas. She was raised in Mexico and homeschooled for most of her childhood by her parents who were educational missionaries. However, for the sophomore and senior years of high school she attended North Avenue Presbyterian School in Atlanta, Georgia.
Austin received a BA in mathematics from Wilson College in 1938 where she was a student of Dorothy Weeks. She then went on to earn an MA from Smith College in 1939 and a PhD in Physics from MIT in 1942. At MIT, Austin was the student and protégé of Julius Stratton, an electrical engineer and later president of MIT. Austin's dissertation was on the theory of propagation of electromagnetic radiation through Earth's atmosphere.
Career
Austin began her career in the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where she contributed to the development of Long Range Navigation (LORAN) and radar in World War II. She was praised in the New York Times on January 18, 1942, as one of nine women contributing wartime science and technology. Her work contributed to the then new application of radar to weather.
In 1946, she joined the newly formed MIT Weather Radar Project as the expert on electromagnetic theory.
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