Barbara Low, who was among a core of female scientists whose research in the 1940s unleashed a bonanza of lifesaving antibiotics, and whose gumption gained her followers a foothold in a male-dominated field, died on Jan. 10 at her home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She was 98.

Her death was confirmed by Lucky Tran, a spokesman for the Irving Medical Center of Columbia University, where Dr. Low taught for nearly 60 years and was professor emeritus of biochemistry and molecular biophysics. Her death was announced belatedly because it took time for the university to gather biographical details, Dr. Tran said.

Dr. Low’s role in identifying the structure of penicillin was something of a fluke.

As a student at Oxford University in England, she was a protégée of the future Nobel laureate Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who, having been barred from teaching men, taught at Oxford’s Somerville College, a women’s school at the time.