Maria Dworzecka

Maria Dworzecka was born in Bialystok, Poland, in 1941, shortly before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. She lost her father in the bombing of the city, and was forced to live in the Bialystok ghetto with her mother. In 1943, they escaped the ghetto with false documents, but were separated when her mother was arrested as a partisan. Maria was rescued and sheltered by a Polish couple, who raised her as their own daughter until the end of the war. She was reunited with her mother in 1946, but lost her again in a car accident in 1948. She was then adopted by a Jewish couple, who gave her the surname Dworzecka. She attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied physics and mathematics. She earned her master's degree in 1964 and her doctorate in 1968. She faced antisemitism and political unrest in Poland, and decided to emigrate to the United States in 1970. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, before joining the University of Maryland, College Park, as a research associate in 1974. She became a professor of physics at George Mason University in 1982, where she remained until her retirement in the 2010s. She was a pioneer in computational nuclear physics, and developed educational software for physics simulations. She also taught and mentored many students, especially women, in physics and astronomy. She was a Holocaust survivor, and shared her story with the public through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She died peacefully in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2023, at the age of 81. She was survived by her daughter, Ania Aman, and her son-in-law, Eric Aman.