Quick Facts
Biography
Tatiana Birshtein or Tat'yana Maksimovna Birshtein (born 20 December 1928) is a Russian molecular scientist. Birshtein specialised in the physics of polymers. In 2007 she was given the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.
Life
Birshtein was born in Saint Petersburg in 1928. She attended Leningrad State University.
Birshtein specialised in the theoretical physics of polymers in St Petersburg at the Institute of Macromolecular Compounds of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This institution had been created as part of Professor Mikhail Volkenshtein's 1950s Leningrad school of polymer science. The institution was synonymous with Birshtein and she is said to have dedicated her life to science.
On 22 February 2007 she was awarded $100,000, when she was given the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science. The award was for her "contribution to the understanding of the shapes, sizes and motions of large molecules."