Laura Iglesias Romero

She was the oldest of a Leon family of nine brothers, grew up and was educated in León, in a Carmelitas college and Instituto Femenino, where she did her baccalaureate studies. She moved to Madrid to study Chemistry in University. Her father was telegraphist and her mother, teacher, asked for the re-entry when their children grew up. Excellent student with good marks in baccalaureate and in the final examination, Iglesias obtained an Alejandro Salazar scholarship to study in University. She enjoyed the scholarship during the first two undergraduate courses at Universidad de Madrid, for which she moved to the capital, where she lived with one of her mother’s sisters that taught her piano lessons. In order to qualify for a teaching position and secure a future that her father feared difficult, she studied the corresponding subjects, in order to prepare for the state teacher examination. She passed the exam with number 3 qualification and obtained a teacher position in Toledo province. Meanwhile, after failing one subject of her chemistry degree, she lost the scholarship and ended her science studies while teaching private lessons to help her family, who had already moved to Madrid as well. After a few months working as a teacher, she was replaced in order for her to finish her chemistry studies.

She obtained her doctorate in 1953 with a thesis about Niblium spectroscopy conducted by Miguel A. Catalán, Physics Professor at University of Madrid who then directed the Atomic Spectrum section of Instituto de Óptica Daza de Valdés in CSIC. It was Laura Iglesias who approached him after attending her doctoral course in University of Madrid. With Olga García Riquelme, Rafael Velasco and Fernando Rico, they form the first spectroscopist group who learned directly from Catalán.  The work on spectroscopy in this group was done thanks to the transition metal plates that Catalán brought from his stays in the United States, of the Princeton University spectroscope and later the largest available at the National Boureau of Standards in Washington. From there came both material for investigations and recognition of the work done with his collaboration. As for Laura Iglesias, since 1954 her publication, both of those that appeared in Spanish magazines and those that appeared in foreign magazines, were recognized by the group that directed A.G. Shenstone in Princeton. While doing her research from 1953 to 1957 she taught Atomic-Molecular Structure and Spectroscopy for free at the University of Madrid as an assistant teacher, and last year as an associate professor.

Her training as a spectroscopist with Miguel Catalán was completed in the United States in 1957 and 1958, the first year with a scholarship from the Institute of International Education of the United States and the second with an appointment as assistant researcher in the Physics Department of Princeton University. It was Catalán who recommended her this destination and who supported her application for a scholarship through his contact with the physicists at Princeton, and who also got lot of compliments on the first results of Laura Iglesias' work. Among them, those referring to the singlets of Manganese II (Mn II) were highly celebrated in the group of spectroscopists of Princeton around A. G. Shenstone. It was a time of expansion of transition metal spectroscopy, whose group of specialists was small and its members were in constant contact. Until the mid-1970s Laura Iglesias' work was devoted to the spectra of manganese, rhodium, gold, vanadium, cobalt, molybdenum and tungsten.

The work of collecting data from plates and extended reproductions of these on paper required consistency and precision, as well as an intensive dedication to detailed measurements that accounted for spectral characteristics from wavelength and, therefore, energy values. Once the group of spectroscopists provided the accepted and normalized values of the orbital energies corresponding to these transition metals, these were incorporated into computers to contribute to the development of astrophysics. Laura Iglesias followed in the footsteps of Miguel Catalán, was trained with his support and after his death in 1959 continued to research on the spectra of transition metals to account for their atomic structure. Her work was recognized from a very early age abroad and cautiously in Spain, where there were no spectroscopy specialists at the same level as Catalán and those who trained with him.

Laura Iglesias is a research professor at the CSIC, at whose Instituto de Óptica she developed her entire scientific career, directed only a doctoral thesis and during the 1950s, having just graduated, she combined her research with university teaching. She retired in 1990. In 2007 the Science Museum of Valladolid created an award with her name.

Maria Jesus Santesmases

Instituto de Filosofía, CSIC