Elizabeth Monroe Boggs
Born
Elizabeth Monroe

(1913-04-05)April 5, 1913
Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
DiedJanuary 27, 1996(1996-01-27) (aged 82)
Camden, New Jersey, U.S.
Alma mater
Spouse
Fitzhugh Willets Boggs
​
​
(m. 1941; died 1971)​

Elizabeth Monroe Boggs (April 5, 1913 - January 27, 1996) was an American policy maker, scholar, and advocate for people with developmental disabilities. The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey named "The Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities" in late 1997 in her honor.

Early life

Elizabeth Monroe Boggs was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Concord Academy[1] and, in 1935, Elizabeth graduated from Bryn Mawr College summa cum laude, with distinction in mathematics.[2] John Lennard-Jones supervised her PhD work in the Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Cambridge;[3] and Maurice Vincent Wilkes assisted her with the university's differential analyser built out of Meccano.[4][5] After graduating in 1939, Monroe joined John Kirkwood’s group at Cornell University. She also worked in the Explosives Research Laboratory in Bruceton, Pennsylvania during the war years.[6] Her research on explosive lenses contributed to the implosion-type atom bomb used in the Trinity test and on Nagasaki.[7][8]

In 1941, she married Fitzhugh Willets Boggs (1911–1971).[9][10] After the birth of their son David (1945–2000),[11] who had developmental disabilities following an infection,[12][13] she became involved in advocacy and the development of public policy for people with disabilities.

Research achievements

Elizabeth Monroe is famous for having predicted in 1941, with John G. Kirkwood, in the Journal of Chemical Physics,[14] that a system of hard spheres would undergo a liquid-solid phase transition. The original paper clearly states the seminal prediction "... that a system of hard spheres without attraction must crystallize at sufficiently small volumes".

Advocacy work

A founder of the National Association for Retarded Children (now known as The Arc of the United States), she served as the Association's first woman president.[2] Throughout her career, she remained involved with The Arc's Governmental Affairs Committee and its activities.[2]

She was appointed by John F. Kennedy to serve on the President's Panel on Mental Retardation and as vice-chair of The Task Force on the Law, 1961–1963, and on the President's Committee on Mental Retardation.[2][12]

Working with the International League of Societies for the Mentally Handicapped, she was a principal author of the United Nations Declaration of General and Special Rights of the Mentally Retarded. With Justin Dart, Elizabeth Boggs co-chaired the congressionally appointed Task Force on Rights and Empowerment of People with Disabilities, an important impetus to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. She served on the SSI Modernization Project and, at the time of her death, was serving on the Social Security Administration's Task Force on Representative Payees.[2]

Elizabeth Boggs' many national awards and recognitions include the Kennedy International Award for Leadership, the Distinguished Public Service Award from HEW (now United States Department of Health and Human Services), the Distinguished Service Award from UCPA, the Wallace Wallin Award from CEC, and the N. Neal Pike Prize for Service to People with Disabilities. She was also recognized by the American Association of University Affiliated Programs, The Arc-US, and the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. Elizabeth was a Life Fellow of AAMR (now American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities), and an Honorary Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Elizabeth was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Kean College, and Ohio State University.[2]

References

  1. ↑ "Troth Is Announced of Miss E. Monroe; Graduate of Bryn Matar Will Be Bride of Fitzhugh Boggs". The New York Times. June 22, 1941. pp. D2. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved August 18, 2023.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "About Elizabeth M. Boggs, PhD". The Elizabeth M. Boggs Center. Archived from the original on November 11, 2018.
  3. ↑ Monroe, E.; Lennard-Jones, J. E. (1938). "On the energies associated with the two-centre problem". Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. 34 (3): 375–381. Bibcode:1938PCPS...34..375M. doi:10.1017/S0305004100020314. S2CID 96767334.
  4. ↑ Wilkes, Maurice V. (1985). Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-262-23122-0.
  5. ↑ Robinson, Tim (June 2005), "The Meccano Set Computers A history of differential analyzers made from children's toys", IEEE Control Systems Magazine, 25 (3): 74–83, doi:10.1109/MCS.2005.1432602, S2CID 10075776
  6. ↑ Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade, Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L.; Baym, Gordon; Hewlett, Richard; Kerr, Alison; Penneman, Robert; Redman, Leslie (May 28, 1993). Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945 (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 168. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511665400. ISBN 978-0-521-44132-2.
  7. ↑ Brown, Eric N.; Borovina, Dan L. (December 3, 2021). "The Trinity High-Explosive Implosion System: The Foundation for Precision Explosive Applications". Nuclear Technology. 207 (sup1): S204–S221. arXiv:2103.05714. Bibcode:2021NucTe.207S.204B. doi:10.1080/00295450.2021.1913954. ISSN 0029-5450. S2CID 244134026.
  8. ↑ Boggs, Elizabeth M. (1985). "Who's Putting Whose Head in the Sand?". In Rutherford Turnbull III, H.; Turnbull, Ann P. (eds.). Parents Speak Out: Then and Now. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company. p. 41. ISBN 978-0-675-20404-0 – via Internet Archive.
  9. ↑ "Elizabeth Monroe Bride; Wed to Fitzhugh Willets Boggs in Manchester, Vt., Ceremony". The New York Times. September 21, 1941. p. 40. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved August 18, 2023.
  10. ↑ "Dr. Fitzhugh Boggs, Ordnance Expert, 59". The New York Times. January 18, 1971. p. 35. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved August 18, 2023.
  11. ↑ "Paid Notice: Deaths Boggs, Jonathan David". The New York Times. March 3, 2000. pp. A19. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved February 6, 2023.
  12. 1 2 Shorter, Edward (2000). The Kennedy Family and the Story of Mental Retardation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-1-56639-782-7 – via Internet Archive.
  13. ↑ "Dr. Elizabeth Monroe Boggs, 82, Founder of Group for Retarded (Published 1996)". The New York Times. January 30, 1996. pp. B16. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved August 18, 2023.
  14. ↑ Kirkwood, John G.; Monroe, Elizabeth (July 1941), "Statistical Mechanics of Fusion", Journal of Chemical Physics, 9 (7): 74–83, Bibcode:1941JChPh...9..514K, doi:10.1063/1.1750949
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