Salwa Nassar: The first woman physicist in Lebanon

Salwa Nassar was the first woman to enrol in the American University of Beirut’s Mathematics Department. Upon her graduation from AUB, she was awarded a scholarship from Smith College in Boston, Massachusetts where she obtained her M.S. in Physics. In 1945, she was awarded a Ph.D. in “Cosmic Ray Showers” from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1950, she became the first woman to chair the Physics Department at AUB. ¹