Ruth Sherman Tolman (October 9, 1893 – September 18, 1957) was an American psychologist. Early life Tolman was born in Washington, Indiana on October 9, 1893. Not much is known about her early life. She received her undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1917. During her initial graduate studies at UCLA, she surveyed psychological variations in different groups of criminals. This is where she met her husband, Richard Tolman, a mathematical physicist and physical chemist who served as the dean of the graduate school at the time. Tolman, who moved to the California Institute of Technology in 1922, is best known for serving as vice chairman of the National Defense Research Committee (under chairman Vannevar Bush) and as a scientific advisor to Major General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project during World War II. They married in 1924 when she was thirty years old. Career During her career, Tolman was a prominent figure in the subfield of clinical psychology. Following her marriage, she stayed on as a research associate and instructor at UCLA (1927-1929) before teaching at Occidental College (instructor of psychology; 1930-1932) and Scripps College (lecturer in psychology; 1934), also receiving her M.A. in psychology from Occidental in 1930. Shortly before completing her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1937, she became the senior psychological examiner for the Los Angeles County Probation Department (1936-1940). While writing six books and helping to create an early treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, she was also the first woman ever to be elected to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). There was much controversy that surrounded her being elected, as Richard Tolman's brother was the creator of the SPSSI. Tolman was very confident in her abilities and did not attribute her success to her connection to her brother-in-law. She was proactive in helping other women achieve the same goals as she had. Throughout World War II, she served on a committee called the Service of Women Psychologists in the Emergency Committee on Psychology (ECP). The organization's purpose was to help prepare women psychologists to fill the role of male psychologists who were away, serving in the military, and to help address the discrimination felt by female psychologists. As the war commenced, Tolman was recruited by government agencies that were then hiring psychologists. After the Tolmans temporarily relocated to