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Nobel physicist's wife has Norwin ties
David Gross and his wife, Jacquelyn Savani
Rod Rolle/Getty Images
Craig Smith can be reached via e-mail or at 412-380-5646.
She was on her way to Chatham College as a National Merit Scholar to study English. An aspiring writer, she was editor of the school newspaper her senior year and worked summers at the Irwin Standard-Times Observer.
At Chatham, she took an astronomy course to fulfill the science requirement. It changed her life, unlocking a passion for physics that would lead her to Princeton University, where she was science writer for 15 years.
"Without the course launching my passion for physics, I would probably not be married to my husband," she said.
Her husband, David Gross, has been named this year's Nobel Prize winner in physics for his work in Quantum ChromoDynamics, or QCD.
Gross is director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the first incumbent of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
The call came from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm at 2:30 a.m. Oct. 5.
"It was a bolt out of the blue, or the black night sky," Savani said. "David did a press conference with Stockholm while he was lying in bed in his pajamas."
Savani is assistant to the chancellor and executive chancellor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and acts as media relations consultant to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.
As her husband took hour after hour of telephone calls from the European press, she set about the business of writing press releases and planning coverage of the announcement.
Her husband received more than 1,000 e-mails, Savani said.
She made a call to her mother, Genevieve Savani in North Huntingdon Township, at about 6 a.m. local time.
"I was half-awake and then she told me and I started screaming," Genevieve Savani said. "He's a very brilliant man."
Genevieve Savani became the Norwin School District's first school psychologist after serving as principal at Circleville Elementary School. She worked in that position for 15 years.
Gross shares the $1.3 million prize with Frank Wilczek, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and H. David Politzer, a California Institute of Technology physics professor.
Wilczek was Gross' graduate student at Princeton University when the pair made the key discovery of how the "strong" force works to bind the constituent elements, called quarks, of protons and neutrons.
The other three forces of nature -- electromagnetism, the "weak" force responsible for radioactive decay, and gravity -- all diminish in strength with distance. Gross and Wilczek discovered that the strong force grows stronger with distance.
Before David Gross and his wife head to Sweden in December to receive his Nobel Prize, they'll attend a reception at the White House and travel to France in November to receive France's highest scientific honor, the Grande Medaille D'Or.
In North Huntingdon, Genevieve Savani has something to brag about. The son-in-law she didn't understand when she watched him on the television program Nova has won a Nobel Prize.
"I can say a Nobel Prize man slept in our house," she said.
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