Dates

• Existence: 1901 - 1991

Biography

Sylvia M. Goergen was born on July 18, 1901 in Buffalo, New York. She earned her B.A. from the University of Buffalo in 1923 and her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa) in 1928. Goergen married Wesley C. Stoesser in 1929 and was hired along with her husband by Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan, that same year. Sylvia Stoesser was hired directly by H. H. Dow, foregoing the usual hiring procedure, since women were not considered part of the Dow workforce in the 1920s. She was the first woman hired as a physical chemist and the only Ph.D. in the group. Stoesser assisted with writing the first complete book published on styrene, Styrene: Its Polymers, Copolymers and Derivatives, published in 1952. She contributed a chapter to the publication A History of the Dow Physics Lab, published in 1990. During her ten years of working for Dow, Stoesser earned twenty-nine patents.

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