Renate Chasman

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Renate Wiener Chasman (January 10, 1932 – October 17, 1977) was a physicist who helped develop particle accelerators. Born in Berlin to German Jewish parents, her family fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and settled in Sweden. She and her sister Edith later studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She earned a Master of Science in physics in 1955, with minors in chemistry and mathematics, and a PhD in experimental physics in 1959. Her doctoral work showed that a pseudoscalar component did not affect parity nonconservation in beta decay. Chien-Shiung Wu invited her to Columbia University as a research associate, where she met Wu's student Chellis Chasman; they married in 1962.

The couple then moved to Yale University to work with David Allan Bromley in 1962, and Renate joined Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1963, moving to the accelerator department in 1965. At Brookhaven she helped improve accelerators, redesigning the alternating-gradient proton synchrotron (AGS). With George Green, she helped invent the Chasman-Green lattice used in storage rings. Renate Chasman died of melanoma in 1977. Brookhaven National Laboratory has a scholarship named after her.