Isabel Joy Bear

Bear was born in Camperdown, Victoria.[2] Her parents were Isabel Hilda Bear and Rolfe William Bear.[2] Her father had served in the Australian Defence Force, and bought a dairy farm in Derrinallum after returning from World War I.[2] She attended the Derrinallum and South Caulfield State Schools and Hampton High School, where she was the school prefect.[2] Toward the end of her school career, Bear had become interested in scientific research.[2] In 1944, at only seventeen years old, Bear joined a chemistry laboratory in the first iteration of CSIRO, where she worked as a laboratory assistant.[2] During the evening she attended the Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT University), where she earned diplomas in applied chemistry and applied science.[2] During the six years it took Bear to complete her diplomas the criteria for joining CSIRO as a researcher had changed, and Bear was no longer eligible to join.[2]

In the 1950s Bear moved to the United Kingdom, where she worked at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus.[2] She moved to the University of Birmingham, where she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the department of metallurgy.[2] Whilst working in Birmingham Bear became interested in solid-state chemistry.[2]

Bear joined the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIRO) in 1953, where she would go on to work for over forty years.[2] She specialised in mineral chemistry, studying the chemical properties of zirconium, hafnium and sulphides.[2] With Principal Research Scientist Ken McTaggart, Bear studied phototropic effects in white oxides, including titanium oxide.[2][3] She worked with the Western Mining Co., Ltd., with whom she extracted lithium from Western Australian spodumene.[2] In the 1960s Bear identified several new metastable zirconium sulphate hydrates (a heptahydrate and pentahydrate) and worked to uncover their crystal structures.[4]

In 1964 Bear and her colleague Dick Thomas became the first to scientifically describe the smell of rain, for which Thomas coined the term petrichor.[5][6] Thomas and Bear, like many researchers before them, noticed that dry clays and soils evolve a characteristic odour when they were breathed upon. She performed a series of experiments; steam distilling rocks that had been exposed to dry conditions. During these investigations Bear noticed that the smell was due to a yellowish oil, which they named "petrichor" – blood of the stone.[7] In 2015 researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a high speed video that visualised the aerosols released during rainfall.[8]

In 1967 Bear was promoted to the research staff in the Division of Mineral Chemistry at CSIRO, and was the first and only woman to hold such a position.[2][4] Bear was eventually awarded a doctoral degree in Applied Science from the Victoria Institute of Colleges in 1978.[2][4] That year she was promoted to Senior Principal Scientist.[4] She developed powder anodes from galena for using in electrowinning of lead and developed new processes to treat lead sulphate residues.[2]

In 1988 Bear became the first woman to be awarded the Royal Australian Chemical Institute Leighton Memorial Medal.[4] She worked to document the history of the CSIRO Division of Chemical Engineering and Australia's heritage in mineral chemistry in The History of the CSIRO Division of Mineral Chemistry.[9]

• 1974 Elected Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy[1]
• 1986 Elected Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute[1][10]
• 1986 Member of the Order of Australia[11][12]
• 1988 Royal Australian Chemical Institute Leighton Memorial Medal[1]
• 2005 Victorian Honour Roll of Women[1][13]