Quinn grew up in Australia. Of her childhood with her three brothers, she says, "I learned very young how to make myself heard."[6] She graduated in 1959 fromTintern Grammar, Tintern Church of England Girls' Grammar School,[7] in Ringwood East,Victoria, Australia. She began college at theUniversity of Melbourne before moving to the United States and transferring toStanford University. She received her PhD fromStanford in 1967, at a time when less than 2% of physicists were women. She did her postdoctoral work at theDESY (the German Synchrotron Laboratory) in Hamburg, Germany. She next spent seven years atHarvard University before returning to Stanford, where she became a professor of physics in theTheory Group at theSLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, then known as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She retired in 2010[8] and devoted her efforts to education, especially K-12 and preschool science and multilingual education. She and her husband raised two children and have three grandchildren.[9]
Working withHoward Georgi andSteven Weinberg, Quinn showed[10] how the three types ofparticle interactions (strong, electromagnetic, and weak), which look very different as we see their impact in the world around us, become very similar in extremely high-energy processes and so might be three aspects of a single unified force.
WithRoberto Peccei, she originatedPeccei–Quinn theory, which suggested a possible near-symmetry of the universe (now known asPeccei–Quinn symmetry)[2] to explain how strong interactions can maintainCP-symmetry (the symmetry between matter and antimatter) when weak interactions do not. One consequence of this theory is a particle known as theaxion which has yet to be observed but is one candidate for thedark matter that pervades the universe.
She showed how the physics ofquarks can be used to predict certain aspects of the physics ofhadrons (which are particles made from quarks) regardless of the details of the hadron's structure (withEnrico Poggio andSteven Weinberg).[11] This useful property is now known asquark-hadron duality.
She has given public talks in various countries on "The Missing Antimatter", in which she suggests that this area of research is promising.
In 2001, she was elected to become president of theAmerican Physical Society for the year 2004. She was the fourth woman to be elected to the APS presidential line in the Society's 102-year history.[12]
Quinn has had a long term engagement in education issues.[7] She was a cofounder and the first president of theContemporary Physics Education Project, and helped design its first product, the chart of Fundamental Particles and Interactions that appears on many schoolhouse walls next to the periodic table chart. CPEP received the 2017 "Excellence in Physics Education Award" from the American Physical Society, "for leadership in providing educational materials on contemporary physics topics to students for over 25 years."[13]
She was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences (NAS) while she was a staff member atSLAC;[14][15] she was soon made a full professor of physics at Stanford. As a member of NAS, she joined theBoard on Science Education of the National Research Council and has served on a number of its studies. She served as chair of this board for the years 2009–2014.
After retiring from Stanford, she spent her full effort on education. She planned and led the work of the NRC study committee that producedA Framework for K-12 Science Education[4] to guide the development of multi-state standards for science education. These "Next Generation Science Standards" were released in final form in April, 2013. NGSS has been officially adopted by many states and the District of Columbia. Since the release of the Framework, she has worked to support the ongoing process of development, adoption, and implementation of the NGSS.[16][17][18] With Okhee Lee and Guadalupe Valdez, she studied the opportunities for teaching English to English language learners in the context of NGSS.[19]
In 2015, the President ofEcuador appointed her as a member of the board (Comision Gestora) charged with leading the new National University of Education.[20]
2010 - Professor emerita, SLAC, Stanford University
2015–2018 Member of the board (Comision Gestora) of the National University for Education (UNAE) in Ecuador.[20]
January 2019 - Chair of the board of theConcord Consortium, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating innovative educational technology for STEM learning.[22][23]
2021 David M. Lee Historical Lecture in Physics,Harvard University: "A window on particle physics at Harvard in the early 1970's".[27]
2019 J. Robert Oppenheimer Lecture,University of California, Berkeley: "Teaching for Learning: What I have learned from learning research".[28] A video of this lecture is available.[29]
2018 Honorary Degree, Doctor of Science, from theAustralian National University, for her "exceptional contributions to theoretical physics and science education." She was a keynote speaker at graduation.[30]
2018 Awarded the 2018Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics of theFranklin Institute, "for her pioneering contributions to the long-term quest for a unified theory of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions of fundamental particles."[31][32]
2017 Selected to give the annual Dirac Lecture at Cambridge University, sponsored jointly by St John's College and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge. Her topic: "Antimatter: Dirac's incredible prediction and its consequences." She was the first woman scientist to be selected since the lecture series was begun in 1986.[33][34]
2017 Inducted to the "Avenue of Excellence" atTintern Grammar, in the first class of inductees. The "Avenue of Excellence" on the Tintern campus honors Tintern graduates, and aims to inspire current and future students to pursue excellence.[35]
2016Karl Taylor Compton Medal for Leadership in Physics from theAmerican Institute of Physics "for her leadership in promoting K-12 education and outreach, including the development of standards and approaches to science education that have had an enormous influence at the local, state, national and international levels, and for her broad and deep contributions to the advancement of theoretical particle physics."[1][36]
2013J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics from theAmerican Physical Society (With Roberto Peccei): "For their proposal of the elegant mechanism to resolve the famous problem of strong-CP violation which, in turn, led to the invention of axions, a subject of intense experimental and theoretical investigation for more than three decades."[38]
2005 appointed an Honorary Officer of theOrder of Australia, "for service to scientific research in the field of theoretical physics and to education" (the award was honorary because Quinn was no longer an Australian citizen)[40][41][42][43]
2005 Karl F. Herzfeld Memorial Lecture,Catholic University of America: "The Asymmetry Between Matter and Antimatter in the Universe and in the Laws of Physics".[45]
2000Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy (withHoward Georgi andJogesh Pati) "for pioneering contributions to the quest for a unified theory of quarks and leptons and of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions".[47][48][49] She was the first woman to receive this award.
1984 Fellow of theAmerican Physical Society, "For contributions to gauge theories of elementary particles, including influential work on renormalization in grand unified theories and studies of CP violation which led to the idea of the axion."[50]
The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter, Helen R. Quinn and Yossi Nir, illustrated byRutu Modan, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ (2008). (ISBN9780691133096)[53][54]
The Charm of Strange Quarks: Mysteries and Revolutions of Particle Physics, R. Michael Barnett, Henry Muehry, and Helen R. Quinn, Springer-Verlag, New York (2000). (ISBN0-387-98897-1)[55][56]
"Science and Mathematics Education", Jeremy Kilpatrick and Helen Quinn, Ed. An Education Policy White Paper of the National Academy of Education. (2009)[58][59]
A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas, National Academies Press, Washington DC (2012). (ISBN978-0-309-21742-2)[4][60] Quinn was the chair of the committee producing this report and a principal author. (Ref: see page vi of the report.)
"Science and Language for English Language Learners", Okhee Lee, Helen R. Quinn and Guadalupe Valdes, Education Researcher 42(4) 93-127 (2013).[19][61]
Peccei, R. D.; Quinn, Helen R. (15 September 1977). "Constraints imposed by CP conservation in the presence of pseudoparticles".Physical Review D.16 (6). American Physical Society (APS):1791–1797.Bibcode:1977PhRvD..16.1791P.doi:10.1103/physrevd.16.1791.ISSN0556-2821.
Snyder, Arthur E.; Quinn, Helen R. (1 September 1993). "Measuring CP asymmetry in B→ρπ decays without ambiguities".Physical Review D.48 (5). American Physical Society (APS):2139–2144.doi:10.1103/physrevd.48.2139.ISSN0556-2821.PMID10016451.
^Harwit, Martin (2008). "Review ofThe Mystery of the Missing Antimatter the Mystery of the Missing Antimatter by Helen R. Quinn and Yossi Nir".Physics Today.61 (8):53–54.doi:10.1063/1.2970214.
^Lauko, Mary; Devlin, Thomas J. (2001). "Review ofThe Charm of Strange Quarks: Mysteries and Revolutions of Particle Physics the Charm of Strange Quarks: Mysteries and Revolutions of Particle Physics by R. Michael Barnett, Henry Mühry, and Helen R. Quinn".Physics Today.54 (8):50–51.doi:10.1063/1.1404852.
^Beck Clark, Robert (2001). "Review ofThe Charm of Strange Quarks: Mysteries and Revolutions in Particle Physics by R. Michael Barnett, Henry Mühry, and Helen R. Quinn".The Physics Teacher.39 (9): 562.Bibcode:2001PhTea..39..562B.doi:10.1119/1.1482570.
