Faculty Trailblazer Doris Kuhlmann Wilsdorf

If Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf had accomplished nothing more than to show up on time to teach her class in the fall of 1963, she’d merit a place in U.Va.history. Instead, U.Va.’s first female professor outside the School of Nursing forged a distinguished four-decade career of scholarship and invention—and lifelong friendships with her appreciative students.

Though a scholar in her own right in 1963—she was a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania—it was only at the insistence of her husband, Heinz G.F. Wilsdorf, that she arrived at U.Va. as a professor of engineering physics. Heinz had been recruited to join the faculty of U.Va.’s newly created Department of Materials Science, but refused to accept unless Doris, too, was hired.

Not unexpectedly, her appointment was greeted with some skepticism. "The first 25 years were the hardest," says Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf. She overcame the doubters with excellence, both in the lab and in the lecture hall. From that first class, Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf enjoyed a special relationship with her students. "I just came in the first day of class and behaved as if it was a very normal thing. And they behaved, in turn, as if it weren’t a big deal," she says.

But a big deal it was. She became one of the most beloved professors to  walk U.Va.’s halls. "Even the students who were averse to learning physics still seemed to get along with me quite well," she says. "One student wrote of me in the student evaluation, ‘She seems to be a very nice lady. … Why couldn’t she be my grandmother?’"

Many of her students have become lifelong friends, including one of her first graduate students, William A. Jesser (Col ’62, Grad ’66) the former chairman of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. She credits Jesser and his one-time graduate student, Greg Olsen, for much of the department’s success.

On a personal level, the recently retired Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf says her tenure at U.Va. helped develop her beliefs about the complementary relationship between science and religion. "I started to understand that there is a fundamental great unity among all religions. A common sense. Just like science." This strongly held system of beliefs, she says, guided her extraordinary work in becoming one of the most influential inventors in University history.