Physicist and flier who shared Nobel

Katharine Gebbie, a physicist and leading federal administrator who supervised a laboratory whose scientists won four Nobel Prizes in physics in15 years, died Aug. 17 at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. Shewas 84.

She suffered septic shock from a systemic bodily infection of unknown origin, her sister Margaret Alkema said, but an official cause of death is pending.

Starting in 1990, Dr. Gebbie spent 22 years as founding director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory and its predecessor, the Physics Laboratory, at the Gaithersburg, Md.-based National Institute of Standards and Technology.

In those roles, she was widely known in the scientific community but of low visibility to the general public.

Phillips shared a 1997 Nobel Prize for contributions to a technique to slow the movement of gaseousatoms to better study them.

Katharine Blodgett was born in Cambridge, Mass., on July 4, 1932. Her father was a tax lawyer and her mother a stay-at-home parent. Her aunt and namesake was Katharine Burr Blodgett, a General Electric scientist who helped invent a special kind of non reflecting “invisible” glass thatwas the prototype for coatings used today on camera lenses.

She graduated in 1957 from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, although she spent much of her senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to be near her mother, after the disappearance of her father in a small airplane in the jungles of Costa Rica.

“He had taken up flying when he was 50 so he wouldn’t grow old, and it did the trick, although perhaps not quite the way he intended,” Gebbie told a Bryn Mawr College newsletter in 2002.

While an MIT student, she received correspondence addressed to “Miss Blodgett,” she recalled, but the letters all had the same beginning — “Dear Sir,” a vivid reminder of MIT’s bureaucratic clumsiness with female students.

In 1964, Katharine Gebbie received a doctorate in physics at University College in London. For several years in the mid-1960s, she trekked in Nepal, went mountaineering in Turkey and flew around North Americain her mother’s airplane.

In 1968, she began her federal career as a physicist at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, a cooperative venture of the University of Colorado and what was then the National Bureau of Standards.

At her death, she was a senior adviser to the chief of the Physical Measurement Laboratory, splitting her time between its facilities in Gaithersburg, Md., and Boulder, Colo.

In 2015, the National Institute of Standards and Technology named one of its buildings at the Boulder campus for Gebbie, the first time in more than 50 years that a building has been named for a staff member.

Her husband, physicist Alastair Gebbie, whom she married in 1957, died in 2005. Survivors include a sister.