Born: 1927 (Paris, France)
Madeleine M. Joullié (born March 29, 1927) is an American-Brazilian organic chemist. She was the first woman to join the University of Pennsylvania chemistry faculty as well as the first female organic chemist to be appointed to a tenure track position in a major American university. She was one of the first affirmative action officers at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a distinguished record as a teacher of both undergraduate and graduate-level organic chemistry, and as a mentor of students. Joullié is also an active researcher in organic chemistry who has published three textbooks of organic chemistry, more than 18 review articles, and more than 300 scientific papers. Her work in synthesizing organic compounds such as tilorone, furanomycin, and numerous cyclopeptides has led to the development of antibiotic and antiviral drugs.
Madeleine Joullié was born in Paris, France. Her father, an international businessman, soon moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she attended the Lycée Français. The family also lived briefly in São Paulo. There she attended a private school, the Liceu Rio Branco. Joullié moved to the United States to study in 1946. She obtained a B.S. degree in chemistry from Simmons College, a women’s college in Boston, in 1949. Then she moved to Philadelphia, where she was the only full-time female graduate student in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. There weren’t even bathrooms for women in the chemistry building. She earned an M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1953. She worked with Allan R. Day, who inspired Joullié as both a researcher and a teacher. Also at the university, Joullié met Richard E. Prange (1932–2008), a condensed matter theorist in the physics department. They married in 1959.
In 1953, Madeleine Joullié joined the University of Pennsylvania chemistry faculty, the first woman to do so. Originally in a non-tenure-track position, Joullié taught undergraduate organic chemistry five days a week and ran the lab. In her first five years, none of the graduate students would work with her, so she carried out research in collaboration with undergraduates. As more women entered the department, first female and later male graduate students began to work with her. Joullié received a Fulbright scholarship to lecture at the University of Brazil (1965). While there, she wrote a textbook in Portuguese on heterocyclic chemistry. She has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University (1968), CRNS (Grenoble, France, 1987), the University of California at Santa Barbara (1989), and Cambridge, England (1997), but the majority of her career has been spent at the University of Pennsylvania.
Awards:
– 1978 Garvan Medal from the American Chemical Society, in recognition of her accomplishments in teaching and research.