Katharina Boll-Dornberger

Katharina Boll-Dornberger was born in Vienna in 1909 as the daughter of the university professor Walter Karl and Alice Friederike Schiff.[6] She studied physics and mathematics in Vienna and Göttingen.[7] She wrote her dissertation under supervision of V. M. Goldschmidt on the crystal structure of water-free zinc sulfate in Göttingen and handed it in in Vienna in 1934.[7][8] In 1937 she emigrated to England.[7] In England, she worked with John D. Bernal, Nevill F. Mott, and Dorothy Hodgkin.[6] She married Paul Dornberger in 1939.[6] Her sons were born in 1943 and 1946.[6] In 1946, she and her family returned to Germany. At first, she worked as a lecturer for physics and mathematics at the Hochschule für Baukunst in Weimar. Then, she moved to East Berlin. Starting in 1948, she was the head of a department at the Institut für Biophysik at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin.[7] In 1952, she married Ludwig Boll.[6] In 1956, she became a professor at the Humboldt University.[6] In 1958, the Institut für Strukturforschung was created and she was head of the institute until 1968.[6] She died in 1981 in Berlin.[6]

Her research focused on the crystallographic investigation of order-disorder structures.[1] She introduced groupoids to crystallography to describe disordered structures.[1] Roughly 2/3 of her 60 publications focused on order-disorder.[1] The other publications dealt with structure determination of organic and inorganic crystals, methods development in single-crystal diffraction, and the development of equipment for this purpose.[1]

For her work in crystallography, she was awarded two national awards by the German Democratic Republic:

• Patriotic Order of Merit in 1959[9][8]
• National Prize of the German Democratic Republic in 1960[10][8]

A street in Berlin is named after her.[8]