Nadiashda Galli-Shohat
Nadiashda Galli-Shohat (1879–March 6, 1948) was a Russian physicist who made her career in both Russia and the United States. Born Nadiashda Kokaoulina in Siberia, she graduated from the Women's University of Petrograd in 1903. After the 1905 Revolution she joined the Bolshevik Party and took the surname Galli when she married her first husband. She earned a doctorate from Göttingen University in 1914.
From 1915 to 1917 she worked at the Yekaterinburg Meteorological Observatory, and from 1917 to 1922 she was professor and chair of the physics department at Ural Federal University. She later worked at the State Optical Institute in Petrograd. In 1923 she and her second husband, James Alexander Shohat, moved to the United States.
In 1931 she was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She taught physics at several American institutions, including the University of Michigan, Mount Holyoke College, Rockford College, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Galli-Shohat also coauthored a biography of her nephew, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, with Victor Seroff. The book, Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a Soviet Composer, was published in 1943. In 1935, at Bryn Mawr, she published a paper on the reflection of a spherical light wave from a moving plane mirror using the Huygens principle.
Nadiashda Galli-Shohat died on March 6, 1948, in Philadelphia.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 18:01 (CET).