Mary Ann Sweeney
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Mary Ann Sweeney (born 1945)[1] is an American physicist at Sandia National Laboratories. Although her doctoral research concerned astronomy, her work at Sandia has largely concerned inertial confinement fusion and pulsed power.[2]
Sweeney is originally from Mercersburg, Pennsylvania; her parents moved to Baltimore when she was a teenager to improve their children's educational prospects. She majored in physics at Mount Holyoke College,[2] graduating in 1967[3] with a bachelor's thesis concerning white dwarf stars. She went to Columbia University for doctoral study but, unable to find a faculty member at Columbia who would take a female student for the topics that interested her, finished her doctorate at Columbia with an outside advisor from Princeton University.[2]
She met her husband Ed, who was also an astronomy graduate student at the time and later went to law school at the University of New Mexico. She followed her husband to Albuquerque, where he had been assigned for his service in the United States Air Force. Seeking a science job nearby, Sweeney applied to work at Sandia National Laboratories, in "anything but secretarial work", and started her career in pulsed power physics there in 1974.[2]
Sweeney chaired the IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Committee from 1989 to 1990,[4] as its first female chair.[2] She also chaired the Committee on Women in Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society from 2010 to 2012.[5]
Sweeney spent 2 years at the National Nuclear Security Administration and later became editor-in-chief of the annual NNSA/DOE Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan for 6 years.[6] In 2023, she became the point of contact to NNSA.[6]
