Melba Phillips, who died November 8 in an Indiana nursing home at age 97, was a physics professor who made groundbreaking discoveries about deuterium under Robert Oppenheimer in the 1930s and went on to become a national leader in teaching physics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

In 1952, her career was sidetracked when she was fired from her post at Brooklyn College for invoking the Fifth Amendment when asked about communism in New York schools by the Senate’s Internal Security Committee.

Phillips was one of Oppenheimer’s first graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, and was so talented an experimentalist that a physical process was named for her, the Oppenheimer-Phillips effect. The effect involves creating compound atomic nuclei via bombardment with deuterons, or atoms of heavy water that split into their constituent proton and neutron and then reform into other elements. (The effect is described in the handy formula: d + X(Z,A) = C*(Z,A+1) + p.)

She apparently had a cordial relationship with Oppenheimer, although on one chilly February night in 1934, he took her for a ride in the Berkeley hills, parked, and went for a walk, leaving Phillips sitting in the car with a blanket wrapped around her. Two hours later, Phillips told a passing police officer that her escort had disappeared. Oppenheimer was located, asleep at the faculty club, having utterly forgotten her and, apparently, the car. The story of the absent-minded professor ran in papers across the country.

Their findings were published in 1935, but despite the prestige of having a physical effect named for her, Phillips found it hard to locate employment. Being a female physicist during the Depression put her at a double disadvantage, and Phillips made do with temporary appointments at various colleges before being hired at Brooklyn College in 1941. She was named assistant professor in 1944 and also began working part-time at the Columbia University Radiation Laboratory.

In 1945, Phillips became involved in a campaign by the American Association of Scientific Workers to prevent the proliferation of atomic weapons, an effort that led to the formation of the Federation of American Scientists the following year.

Phillips was “a fine but utterly un polished teacher whose lectures were in her head (and which she occasionally had trouble arranging in an orderly fashion as they came out),” wrote George Salzman, a former student, now an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “She was in fact a model for a woman who wanted to be a real person, and who liked physics.”

Phillips’s name was apparently among those given to the Senate committee in 1952 by John Lautner, a former top official of the New York State Communist Party who had become an informer. The committee was also interested in any professor who had signed statements calling for the international outlawing of atomic weapons. After Phillips refused to testify, she was dismissed by both Brooklyn College and the Columbia laboratory.

As jobs for ideologically tainted female physics professors were not forthcoming, Phillips went to work on two textbooks, “Principles of Physical Science,” for undergraduates, and “Classical Electricity and Magnetism,” for graduate students. Both were published in 1955, and the electricity book, in somewhat revised form, is still used in classes. Phillips also edited volumes on the history of physics and of the American Physical Society.

In 1957, Phillips was appointed associate director of a teacher-training institute at Washington University at St. Louis, and in 1962 she joined the University of Chicago as a physics professor. At Chicago, Phillips pushed for teaching physics to nonscience majors, a tradition that has continued to the present.

In 1987, Brooklyn College officially apologized to Phillips for dismissing her, although it had in fact been required to do so by a New York State law that specified termination for any state employee who invoked the right to avoid self-incrimination. A decade later, the college established a scholarship in Phillips’s name.

In 2003, the American Physical Society presented Phillips with an award “for tireless efforts in physics education … and as a model of a principled scientist.”

Melba Newell Phillips

Born February 1, 1907, in Hazelton, Ind.; died November 8 at a nursing home in Petersburg, Ind., of coronary artery disease; she never married, and is survived by a nephew and several nieces.