Profile written by Nessy Allen
WISENET Journal No. 20, September 1989, p. 15
In April this year, Sydney was fortunate to receive a visit from one of Australia's most eminent scientists, the nuclear physicist Joan Freeman. Dr Freeman is the only woman to have won the prestigious Rutherford Medal and only the second Australian -- after Sir Mark Oliphant -- to have done so.
She was born in Perth but her family moved to Sydney when she was very young. Her interest in science developed early. She loved playing with Meccano sets and reading the scientifically oriented articles in the Children's Encyclopaedia. She naturally gravitated to science at school but her ambitions seemed to be thwarted after the Intermediate Certificate by the fact that neither physics nor chemistry was taught to matriculation level at her girls' school. Her mother, however -- a woman devoted to her daughter -- made arrangements to take her once a week at night to join a class of male apprentices at the Sydney Technical College. And so Joan Freeman was able to pursue physics and maths at Sydney University, graduating with First Class Honours in both. She joined the Radiophysics laboratory of CSIR in 1941, working there on radar research and development until she won a CSIR Scholarship which enabled her to go to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to work for her PhD.
Her intention was to return to Australia. But straight after the war there were not many opportunities for nuclear physicists here and so in 1951 she made the difficult decision to join the Harwell Nuclear Physics Division, with which she was associated to the end of her working life.
Dr Freeman was an experimental physicist and concentrated on the study of inelastic neutron scattering. Becuase her work could be applied to basic studies of nuclear structure, she was invited to talk about it at an international conference in New York in 1957. This was followed a couple of years later by a sabbatical spent at MIT, where she met Professor Roger Blin-Stoyle, a theoretical physicist; later the close collaboration which developed between them would lead to their being jointly awarded the Rutherford Medal in 1976.
On her return to Harwell, she was made Group Leader for the group centred on the Tandem Van de Graaff Accelerator, and placed in charge of all the Harwell and other scientists using the Accelerator as well as the 20 or so technical staff. Her own research on the Tandem, which was the experimental side of the work with Blin-Stoyle, concerned the study of the beta-decay of some specific short-lived radioactive nuclei, with half lives of a second or less.
Joan Freeman has never lost her love for science, and physics in particular. She married another Harwell physicist, J V Jelley, whose specialist field was radioastronomy. Although she was forced to retire at 60 (perhaps one of the few areas in which discrimination against women was more blatant in England than in Australia), she maintains her interest in the work at Harwell. At present she is writing her autobiography.