Through generous donations from friends, colleagues, and members of the scientific community, the Jan Talbot Collection officially reached a fundraising milestone of $30,000, ensuring free, permanent access to Talbot’s legacy of ECS-published works.

A longtime ECS member, Talbot served as board president (2001-2002), vice president (1998-2001), and editor of Interface (1995-1998). She was inducted as a Fellow of The Electrochemical Society in 2004. Talbot’s career outside ECS is equally impressive. Since 2000, Talbot has directed the Chemical Engineering Program at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering. She served as their associate dean from 2014-2016. In 2010, she received a UCSD Distinguished Teaching Award. Talbot chaired the Academic Senate from 2003-2004. She also worked as a development engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN, from 1975-1981. (more…)

ECS trading cards recognize some of the top female scientists in the field.

Change isn’t easy. For women, it took lobbying, protests, campaigns, and even jail time to receive the right to vote. It wasn’t until August 26, 1920, when women’s fight for change finally paid off. The Nineteenth Amendment was added to the United States Constitution, giving women the right to vote as citizens of the United States, regardless of their sex. Today, we celebrate women, their achievements, and the continued need for change.

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Jan Talbot (center) with Wendy Coulson (left) and Nicole Pacheco (right), Talbot’s graduate students.

One of the pioneers for women in engineering, Jan Talbot retired from the University of California San Diego on July 1, 2018.

Talbot was one of two women in her chemical engineering class at Penn State University. In 1970, when she started her program, there were only seven women and nearly 3,000 men in engineering.

According to the National Science Foundation, in 1973, 576 women in the U.S. graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering. Two years later, Talbot was one of the 372 women that earned a master’s.

After completing her degrees at Penn State, she became one of two women in her class to graduate from the University of Minnesota in 1986 with a doctorate in engineering and one of 225 women to earn that degree in the whole country.

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