Maria Goeppert-Mayer (June 28, 1906 - February 20, 1972) ) was a German theoretical physicist. Goeppert completed her Ph.D. at the University of G繹ttingen in 1930, and in that same year, she married Joseph Edward Mayer, an assistant of James Franck, and moved to the United States (Mayer's home country). In 1946 she became a voluntary Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago and was offered a part-time job as a Senior Physicist in the Theoretical Physics Division at the Argonne National Laboratory. It was during her time at Chicago and Argonne that she developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, the work for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Paul Wigner. She is the second female laureate in physics, after Marie Curie. In 1960, she was appointed to Professor of Physics at the University of California. Although she suffered from a stroke shortly after arriving there, she continued to teach and conduct research for a number of years. She died in 1972 after a heart attack that had struck her the previous year had left her comatose.