Nadiashda Galli-Shohat

Nadiashda or Nadejda Galli-Shohat (died March 6, 1948)[1] was a Russian physicist. Born Nadiashda Kokaoulina in Siberia,[2] she graduated from the Women's University of Petrograd in 1903,[3] joined the Bolshevik Party after the 1905 Russian Revolution,[2] and took the name Galli upon marrying her first husband.[4] She received her doctorate from Göttingen in 1914,[5] worked at the Yekaterinburg Meteorological Observatory from 1915 to 1917, and from 1917 to 1922 was professor and chair of the physics department at Ural Federal University,[3] after which she worked at the University of Petrograd's State Optical Institute.[6] Together with her second husband, the mathematician James Alexander Shohat, she migrated to the United States in 1923.[5][7] She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1931.[8][9] She taught physics at the University of Michigan, Mount Holyoke, Rockford College, Bryn Mawr,[7] and the University of Pennsylvania.[1]

In addition, Galli-Shohat is known for a biography of her nephew, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, coauthored by her and Victor Seroff. Titled Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life And Background Of A Soviet Composer, it was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1943.[2][10] Galli-Shohat died on March 6, 1948, at the Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia.[11]