Dr. Lois Tiffany played an instrumental role in establishing the Saturday Morning Physics lecture series, which she helped to fund in 1996.  Thanks to her generous endowment, the lecture series became one of the most popular and well attended events in the Physics Department, drawing a diverse crowd packed full of students, teachers, and other physics enthusiasts from the general public.

A pioneer for women in science, Tiffany was the second woman to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh’s engineering school, earning her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and physics in 1938.  At that time, Tiffany became one of seven women members in the American Association of Electrical Engineers.

In the early 1940s, Tiffany did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the Universrity of Illinois.  In 1946, she earned her master’s degree in physics from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. in biophysics from UM in 1971.  Tiffany’s Ph.D. thesis adviser, Samuel Krimm, said that she was “very inquisitive and exuberant about the things she was learning,” traits that led to joint publications by Tiffany and Krimm on protein molecules.

Lois Tiffany’s daughter, Kathryn Tiffany Larcher, said that her mother’s passion for science was “contagious.”  One of Lois’s other daughters, Mary Ann Tiffany, recognized her mother as the inspiration for the family’s interest in the sciences; Tiffany’s son, Bernard, said his mother was “one of the greatest women scientists in the world.”

Lois Tiffany also loved to paint and garden, though her love for science stayed with her until the end of her life. She passed away on Christmas morning while reading a Physics Department newsletter from the University of Michigan at the age of 91.