Born: 23 October 1894, United States
Died: 12 May 1975
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Emma T. R. Williams
American astronomer Emma Vyssotsky received the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1946 for her contributions to the field of stellar spectra. After earning her Bachelor’s in mathematics at Swarthmore College in 1916, she worked at Smith College as an astronomy and mathematics demonstrator before moving to an insurance company to work as an actuary.
After receiving a Whitney Fellowship and a Bartol Scholarship, she began studying astronomy at Harvard’s Radcliffe College in 1927, working with Cecilia Payne on the “spectral line contours of hydrogen and ionized calcium throughout the spectral sequence.” She completed her PhD in 1930, only the third person awarded a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard.
Having married Russian astronomer Alexander N. Vyssotsky in 1929, she followed him to the University of Virginia and its McCormick Observatory, specializing in the motion of stars and the kinematics of the Milky Way. Like many couples in the sciences, they published jointly and worked together. While her husband was offered a professorship, she was only offered an instructor role. She worked at the observatory for well over a decade before she was finally promoted to professor in 1945. However, by this point, she had taken a medical leave of absence after contracting brucellosis, though she did continue to publish.