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Phyllis Brauner Phyllis Brauner, MA '40, grew up in Natick and graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in chemistry in 1938. She enrolled in the master's program at Wellesley the same year, receiving her M.A. in 1940. As we celebrate the 125th anniversary of Wellesley College it behooves us to remember that for the first 100 of those years, Wellesley awarded master's degrees in a number of fields. Graduate students were admitted almost from the opening of the College, and the first MA degrees were awarded in 1882. Master's degrees continued to be awarded until the mid-1970s. In 1975 the Board of Trustees, concerned that the college's single-sex status might be jeopardized if the graduate programs were retained, voted to discontinue to all master's programs, and the last graduate degrees were awarded in 1977.
Phyllis Brauner went from Wellesley to additional graduate study at Purdue University, where she developed her lifelong passion for analytical chemistry. That portion of her graduate career was interrupted by marriage and children, and several years later, after moving to Philadelphia, she obtained a position at Swarthmore College as a laboratory instructor. Following the untimely death of her husband on an Air Force mission in 1948, Phyllis brought her two young daughters back to the Boston area, eventually settling in Wellesley,and accepted a teaching position at Simmons College. At the same time she pursued a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry at Boston University, receiving her doctorate in 1959. Brauner's research interest focussed on issues of water quality and she spent several sabbatical leaves in Sweden and Switzerland working in that area. In 1987 she was part of a joint US/Soviet project that studied the water in Lake Baikal in Siberia. But her travels were not limited to chemical pursuits. She also represented the United States in a People to People mission in the 1970s and took part in projects studying endangered wolves in Poland and Polynesian monuments in the South Pacific.
As is the case with many of Wellesley's alumnae, retirement, to Phyllis Brauner, simply meant moving on to different activities. After leaving Simmons College in 1983 she worked with the Armed Forces School of the University of Maryland teaching and establishing laboratories in Japan and Guam, then she moved to a 12-year teaching stint at Framingham State University. Throughout her long career in Boston, Phyllis was extremely active in the Northeast Section of the American Chemical Society, having a particular interest in the public's perception of chemistry. She chaired the section, served on many committees and organized various chemical events for the public. Phyllis Brauner died in December 2000.
(Much of the material for this piece is drawn from a remembrance of Phyllis Brauner that appeared in The Nucleus, the Newsletter of the Northeast Section of the American Chemical Society. The piece was written by Flick Coleman and coauthored by Arno Hein, Phyllis Brauner's Ph.D. advisor, and Catherine Brauner, one of Phyllis's daughters and Editor of the Wellesley Townsman.)
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