Darleane C. Hoffman is an American nuclear chemist who was
part of the team that confirmed element 106, seaborigum.
Early Life
Darleane Hoffman was born on November 8, 1926 in Terril, Iowa.
After graduating from high school, Hoffman attended Iowa State College and first
majored in applied art. Later, she was inspired by her chemistry professor,
Nellie Naylor, to change direction.
When she first changed her major to chemistry, Hoffman had some
reservations. She knew that many women in science had to choose between having
a career or a family. Hoffman knew that she wanted both, and was further
inspired by Marie Curie, who made many discoveries and won two Nobel prizes
while raising two daughters.
Darleane Hoffman continued at Iowa State
to earn her Ph.D. During this time, she also met her husband, a fellow doctoral
student. While he finished his degree, Darleane went to work at Oak Ridge
Laboratory in Tennessee.
After her husband graduated, they went to work at Los Alamos National
Laboratory in northern New Mexico
to research nuclear chemistry.
Discoveries and Achievements 
Darleane Hoffman worked at Los Alamos
for approximately 31 years. During her time there, she focused mainly upon "heavy"'
elements - those with high atomic masses and an atomic number greater than 92.
These types of elements do not exist naturally, but are discovered or created
by scientists. Hoffman also searched for new elements and isotopes in debris
from nuclear tests.
Ever since the discovery of plutonium in the 1940s,
scientists did not believe that elements with an atomic number higher than
uranium could occur in nature. It was Hoffman who discovered small amounts of
plutonium isotope (plutonium-244) in a rock formation said to be several
billion years old.
Darleane Hoffman also performed a rare study of the
chemistry of hahnium (also known as dubnium). She used the isotope hahnium-262,
which has a half-life of 35 seconds, to study how the element behaved in an
aqueous solution and in a gas phase. She later studied the same properties of
lawrencium-103, which (luckily) had a half-life of three minutes.
Darleane Hoffman also studied spontaneous fission of known
fermium isotopes from nuclear debris. She used her expertise to research the
problem of nuclide migration in the environment. This research eventually left Los Alamos for the Yucca Mountain Project, an underground
repository for nuclear wastes.
In 1984, Darleane Hoffman left Los Alamos to become a
professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
She also became a researcher at the affiliated Lawerence Berkeley National
Laboratory, where she was involved with the discovery of super-heavy elements
114 and 116.
Awards
Darleane Hoffman made many important discoveries throughout
her career. These discoveries have not gone unnoticed by the scientific
community. Some of the awards she has received include the Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1978, the ACS Award for Nuclear Chemistry in 1983 (she was the
first woman to win the award), the Garvan-Olin medal in 1990, the National
Medal of Science in 1997, and the Priestley Medal from the American Chemical
Society in 2000.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darleane_C._Hoffman
http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/jcewww/Features/eChemists/Bios/Hoffman.html
http://www.chemheritage.org/women_chemistry/univ/hoffman.html
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