American plasma physicist
Mary Ann Sweeney (born 1945)[1] is an American physicist at Sandia National Laboratories. Although her doctoral research concerned astronomy, her work at Sandia has largely concerned inertial confinement fusion and pulsed power.[2]
Education and career
Sweeney is originally from Mercersburg, Pennsylvania; her parents moved to Baltimore when she was a teenager to improve their children's educational prospects. She majored in physics at Mount Holyoke College,[2] graduating in 1967[3] with a bachelor's thesis concerning white dwarf stars. She went to Columbia University for doctoral study but, unable to find a faculty member at Columbia who would take a female student for the topics that interested her, finished her doctorate at Columbia with an outside advisor from Princeton University.[2]
She married a fellow Columbia astronomy student and followed him to Albuquerque, where he had been assigned for his service in the United States Air Force. Seeking a science job nearby, Sweeney applied to work at Sandia National Laboratories, in "anything but secretarial work", and started her career in pulsed power physics there in 1974.[2]
Sweeney chaired the IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Committee from 1989 to 1990,[4] as its first female chair.[2] She also chaired the Committee on Women in Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society from 2010 to 2012.[5]
Contributions and recognition
In 1992, Sweeney was named a Fellow of the IEEE "for contributions to the understanding of plasma opening switches and beam interactions with matter in particle beam accelerators".[6] In 2007, Mount Holyoke College gave her their Alumnae Achievement Award.[3]
Sweeney won the 2013 National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Defense Programs Award of Excellence for her work as editor-in-chief of the NNSA Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan.[7] She is one of four coauthors of the book Impactful Times: Memories of 60 Years of Shock Wave Research at Sandia National Laboratories (2017).[8][9]
