Isabella Karle is a renowned chemist and physicist who has worked at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., since 1946 and heads the X-Ray Diffraction Group of that facility. In her research, she applied electron and x-ray diffraction to molecular structure problems in chemistry and biology. Along with her husband Jerome Karle , she developed procedures for gathering information about the structure of molecules from diffraction data. For her work, she has received numerous awards such as the Annual Achievement Award of the Society of Women Engineers in 1968, the Federal Woman's Award in 1973, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Women in Science and Engineering in 1986. Her work has been described in the book Women and Success.

Isabella Lugoski Karle was born on December 2, 1921, in Detroit, Michigan. Her parents were Zygmunt A. Lugoski, a housepainter, and Elizabeth Graczyk, who was a seamstress. Both her parents were immigrants from Poland...