Contact
Research Areas
History of Women and Gender; History of Life Sciences in the 20th Century; History of Public Memory; History of Israeli Science, Scientists, and Scientific Organizations; Policy and Social Change
Education
Ph.D., University of Montreal
M.Sc., Hebrew University of Jerusalem
B.Sc., Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Links
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
Pnina on Women in Science
Scientific Legacies
Scientific Legacies: Pnina Abir-Am
Pnina Geraldine Abir-Am
Pnina Geraldine Abir-Am
Pnina Geraldine Abir-Am is a historian of science who has published widely on the history of women and gender in science, the history of molecular biology, and the history of public memory. She is a recipient of an award from the U.S. History of Science Society for outstanding research in the history of women in science and has edited or co-edited four volumes, among them Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives, Women in Science, 1789-1979 and Commemorative Practices in Science: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory. Recent work focuses on the role of gender in the misallocation of credit in science, the public memory of DNA, and the career of 2009 Nobel Laureate Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute in Israel. In July 2009, Pnina was elected to a four year term as Vice-President of the International Commission on Women in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.
Current Projects
During 2014-2015 Dr. Pnina Geraldine Abir-Am will focus on two projects:
a) A study of the first generation of women scientists whose careers were opened by affirmative action in the US in 1972; and, b) A study of pioneering women scientists in the first decade of the state of Israel (1948-58) and their choices in combining careers in science with family lives under conditions of rapid social change.
Representative Publications
Pnina G. Abir-Am, “Women Scientists of the 1970s: An ego-histoire of a lost generation” in Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto) biography, Gender and Genre, eds. Paola Govoni and Zelda Alice Franceschi, (Gottingen/ Germany: V&R Unipress, 2014) 223-259.
Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram, eds. Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives, Women in Science, 1789-1979 (New Brunswick/NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987, 1989; award winner, History of Science Society, 1988).