Fay Ajzenberg-Selove (February 13, 1926August 8, 2012) was an American nuclear physicist. She was known for her experimental work in nuclear spectroscopy of light elements, and for her annual reviews of the energy levels of light atomic nuclei. She was a recipient of the 2007 National Medal of Science. Early life and education She was born Fay Ajzenberg on 13 February 1926 in Berlin, Germany to a Polish Jewish family from Russian Empire. Her father, Moisei Abramovich Aisenberg (Polish: Mojzesz Ajzenberg), was a mining engineer who studied at the St. Petersburg School of Mines and her mother, Olga Ajzenberg née Naiditch, was a pianist and mezzo-soprano who studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Music. In 1919, they fled the Russian Revolution and settled in Germany, where her father became a wealthy investment banker. They were bankrupted by the Great Depression, so the family moved to France in 1930. Her father worked as a chemical engineer in a sugar beet factory owned by her uncle Isaac Naiditch in Lieusaint, Seine-et-Marne, France. Ajzenberg attended the Lycée Victor Duruy in Paris and Le Collège Sévigné. In 1940, the family fled Paris prior to the Nazi invasion of France. They took a tortuous route through Spain, Portugal, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba before they settled in New York City in April 1941. Ajzenberg graduated from Julia Richman High School in 1943. Her father had encouraged her interest in engineering. She attended the University of Michigan, where she was friends with Haitian president "Papa Doc" Duvalier. She graduated in 1946 with a BS in engineering, the only woman in a class of 100. After briefly doing graduate work at Columbia University and teaching at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier, she began doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At Wisconsin she worked with nuclear physicist Hugh Richards who was studying nuclear reaction energies and classifying the energy levels of light atoms. She found a method of creating 6Li targets by converting the sulphate to a chloride and electroplating it to the target. She also demonstrated that the excited states of the 10B nucleus were not evenly spaced as previously thought. She received her MS in 1949 and her PhD in physics in 1952 with a dissertation titled "Energy levels of some light nuclei and their classification." She was an atheist. Physics career She did postdoctoral work with Thomas Lauritsen at the California