Sonja Krause
Sonja Krause Goodwin was a Swiss-American physical chemist specializing in the thermodynamics and effects of electric fields on polymer solutions, and also interested in climate history.
Education and career
Krause was born in 1933 in St. Gallen, Switzerland. When she was a child, she left Europe with her parents to escape Nazi Germany, emigrating to New York City, where her parents sold German-language books. She went to the Bronx High School of Science, as one of the first women to attend that school, and graduated from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1954. She completed a Ph.D. in 1958 at the University of California, Berkeley, with the dissertation Electric Birefringence Studies of Some Macromolecular Solutions Using Microsecond Transients.After working in industry at the Rohm & Haas Company, she spent several years in the mid-1960s in the Peace Corps heading the physics department at the University of Lagos in Nigeria, and later in Ethiopia. She returned to Rensselaer as a faculty member in physical chemistry in 1967, and was named full professor in 1978. She retired in 2004.