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Nearly five decades after she had to abandon her innovative research, set adrift by a prestigious university after her Ph.D. adviser died, East Bay scientist Cheryl Dembe is finally earning well-deserved recognition: a doctorate degree in chemistry.
In a remarkable pivot, the elite University of Chicago has awarded Dembe the graduate degree and is flying her to next month’s convocation ceremony, where she’ll walk with other newly-minted Ph.D.s to realize a dream she had almost surrendered.
“All my life, I thought of myself as a woman who didn’t make it,” said Dembe, now in her 70s and living in Lafayette. “I am extraordinarily grateful, after all these years, to be taken seriously.”
A rare female chemistry grad student in 1971, on the brink of writing her thesis, she was stranded by the sudden death of her mentor, then rebuffed by other faculty who lacked expertise in her field and reportedly didn’t want a woman on their team.
Stunned and saddened, she packed up her data and drove to California, where she built a new life teaching community college students at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill.
Twice, she appealed to the university to grant her a degree.
And now – almost unimaginably – it has.
After an extensive review of her old lab notebooks, despite a missing thesis, the university has judged her work worthy of a doctorate.
“We thank you,” wrote Andrei Tokmakoff, chair of the University of Chicago’s Department of Chemistry, “for presenting us with an opportunity to partially rectify these mistakes of the past.”
It’s too late for “what ifs.” How would her career have been different, if devoted to scientific research? Could her work have helped Chicago beat Cornell University in the race to achieve “superfluid” low-temperature helium? She’ll never know.
Instead, her Bay Area life took a very different turn — eccentric, inspired and ultimately happy.
Born in Cleveland, young Dembe’s academic journey was propelled by a female chemistry teacher who taught her to memorize complex concepts — the solubility chart for net ionic equations and the Grignard reaction for alcohol synthesis, for example – in song. In a lovely soprano, Dembe can recite them still.
“I thought by studying chemistry I would learn the truth about the universe and what it was made of,” she said.
She arrived at the University of Chicago at a turbulent time. It was the late 1960s, when students feared the draft and the campus was rocked by political upheaval and violent protests against the Vietnam War.
Women, routinely excluded from opportunity, also became activists, marching and picketing for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
And money for scientific research dried up. With the race to the moon over, faculty worried about their future.
“This was a very difficult time for education,” she recalled.
Dembe kept her head down, completing coursework and passing oral exams, determined to survive a famously rigorous program. Of her 49 classmates, only 23 made it to the final year. Six were women.
She dreamed her research would lead to a breakthrough in low-temperature chemistry. With the guidance of adviser Lothar Meyer, she studied how the two helium isotopes, Helium-3 and Helium-4, have profoundly different behaviors when they are cooled. She succeeded in sustaining the particles at nearly absolute zero, -273.15°C. She also found a novel approach to use the magnetic properties of the particles to determine their temperatures.
While the relevance of such research was unknown at the time, later achievements in this field of “superfluidity” would earn a Nobel Prize. It has since contributed to theories about the Big Bang and the origins of the universe.
After 2.5 years of research, adviser Meyer told her the happy news: She had enough good data to start writing her thesis. She’d be done in six months, he said.
Then, 10 days later, he died.
“I had shellshock,” she recalled. “When he died, they dismantled the lab. Wiped it out.”
“I was devastated by his death, but still wanted to complete my research project by writing and publishing my work,” she said. “No one I knew was stepping up to be in charge of me. You can’t just write up these things without a faculty adviser.”
She was offered a replacement adviser in a related research group, “but he said, ‘Sorry, we won’t have a woman,’ ” she said. “That was the last time anybody really talked to me.
“Not one person was willing to look at my years of research. Not one person,” she said.
The only remaining option, she was told, was starting a new project from scratch in a research group that would accept her.
She said she didn’t have the strength to challenge the department. Long before the university’s anti-discrimination policies, she had no legal recourse.
“It was the dark night of my soul,” she said.
Even now, it is very difficult for students to lose an adviser, said University of Chicago professor Philippe Guyot-Sionnest of the Departments of Chemistry and Physics, who led the committee that reviewed her work.
“The adviser-student relationship is a partnership, and if one partner disappears, it’s very hard to continue,” he said. “Each faculty is an expert, and it is hard to advise in a topic where you’re not an expert.”
Because Dembe’s experience was so long ago, almost all the faculty of that era has died, and no one could recollect whether she was excluded because she was a woman, he said.
“That environment was different than now. We see things in a different light,” he said. “There is more caring for graduate students.”
Meanwhile, campuses have instituted an array of programs to help women, coaching them on how to negotiate for salaries, research funds and child care money.
Women in the sciences are making highly visible gains. While the faculties of elite research universities remain overwhelmingly male, many female scientists now have laboratories and salaries equivalent to men. The number of women earning Ph.D.s in science has substantially increased — accounting for 45 to 50 percent of biology doctorates and 33 percent of those in chemistry.
But back in the ‘70s, Dembe had far fewer options. Once in California, she married, raised a family and taught at Diablo Valley College for 34 years, serving in leadership positions and working to ensure new mothers got maternity leave.
She turned to spirituality and music, adopting the name Sundari Cheryl. She lived in an Indian ashram, learned sacred languages and explored faiths ranging from Sufism and Buddhism to Christian mysticism. She was baptized in the Jordan River. She chanted at Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider. She became a psychic. And she continued to think about chemistry, self-publishing a book called “The Choice of Happiness, Glimpses From an Extraordinary Ordinary Scientific Mystical Life“.
Now widowed, she devotes an hour every day to what she calls ” ‘planetary healing’, likely my truest job.”
“I spread out into other facets of life,” she said cheerfully, seated in a lotus position. “A lifetime of research was closed off to me.”
But she saved her data. “All these decades, I dragged it around with me,” she said.
An appeal to the university in 2000 went ignored. Then in 2018, after a tearful pilgrimage to the Paris tomb of Marie Curie and emboldened by the #MeToo movement, she tried yet again.
This time, their response was different: Its Department of Chemistry would consider her, it said, but she must submit her work to scrutiny.
In a frenzy, she pulled her old lab notebooks from their distant corner of her bookshelf. With the help of her son, she labored until 3 a.m., every night for a week, scanning her notes, charts and graphs so they could be emailed to Chicago.
To prepare for their questions, she struggled to recall quantum mechanics and other advanced coursework but felt overwhelmed.
“I knew I couldn’t write a thesis. To think of trying to defend the work or even expressing what I did … it was quite a shock. People were incredibly supportive.”
The Chicago team faced its own daunting task. Dembe’s data, compiled before computers, bore no resemblance to what research looks like now. She had much less data than required now, with calculations done on a slide rule. Pages had been copied on ditto machines; photocopying was not yet widespread.
“We tried to get as much information as we could,” said Guyot-Sionnest. “One fortunate thing is that she kept very good quality notebooks about her day-to-day work in the lab. We were able to read that. I was also able to get records of her Ph.D. adviser, who had graduated other students in three years.”
“We pored through her notebooks,” he said. “There was not an ‘Aha!’ moment where she discovered superfluidity. But it seemed like her research was making very good progress on an important aspect of liquid helium.
“Her research was going to be important, had she been able to finish it,” he said.
As the June 15 ceremony approaches, it still seems unreal, said Dembe. She feels only gratitude, not anger.
“It is utterly amazing. I can’t believe they stepped so far outside the box to make this right,” she said. “I believed in them as an institution with integrity, with the need to correct the error. And they did.
“My sense of who and what I am is shifting with the understanding that, in fact, I always could have made it with the ‘big guys.’ ”
