Johanna M. Levelt-Sengers

Dr. Levelt Sengers joined the National Bureau of Standards (First Washington, D.C., then Gaithersburg, Md.) in 1963. The agency was renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1988.

As a research physicist, Levelt Sengers and her collaborators worked on critical phenomena in fluids and fluid mixtures, from theory to experiment and databases for practical application. They developed critical-region scaling concepts for fluids and fluid mixtures, and for solubility behavior near a solvent's critical point. They also performed measurements of density, phase behavior and other properties of industrially important fluids such as carbon dioxide, ethylene, water and geothermal fluids. They worked on databases for properties of water and steam for applications in science and in the electric power industry that included critical properties, and refractive index and dielectric constant correlations up to high pressures and temperatures. Several of these are standards of the International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam (IAPWS), and some are embedded in the ASME Steam Tables.

As a NIST group leader (1978-87), Levelt Sengers oversaw projects related to alternative refrigerants, ionic fluids criticality, and supercritical fluids. She co-organized the first NATO Summer School on Supercritical Fluids in Kemer, Turkey, in 1993. She has published extensively in the archival literature, and contributed 14 book chapters.

Since her retirement from NIST in 1994, she has written on the history of her field of thermodynamics, including a book titled How Fluids Unmix in 2002. Very recently, as the co-chair of a panel of the InterAcademy Council, she co-authored a report "Women for Science" to advise the world's science and engineering academies on how to attract, retain and promote more women in science and technology worldwide.

Levelt Sengers has been an active member of what is presently the ASME Research Subcommittee on the Properties of Water and Steam. This subcommittee is responsible for maintaining and upgrading the ASME International Steam Tables. It also serves as the U.S. National Committee to the IAPWS and Levelt Sengers was the U.S. National representative to the IAPWS (1990-2004).

At the request of the ASME Heat Transfer Division's Committee on Thermophysical Properties, Levelt Sengers organized the 12th Symposium on Thermophysical Properties held in Boulder, Colorado, in 1994, and served as a co-editor of the proceedings.

Levelt Sengers is a fellow of ASME, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an Honorary Fellow of the IAPWS. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the National academy of Sciences, and is a correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities.

Among her other honors are NIST and Department of Commerce awards, the Interagency Committee for Women in Science and Engineering's WISE Award (1985) and the L'Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Award (2003).  

Detailed list of Dr. Levelt-Sengers' Publications and Talks