Ethel Grodzins Romm

Ethel Grodzins Romm (born March 3, 1925) is an American author, journalist, retired project manager, former CEO of an environmental technology company and Co-Chair of the Lyceum Society of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Romm graduated from high school in 1942 and trained as a mechanical engineering draftsman. She worked for the U.S. Air Force for the rest of World War II, becoming a project supervisor. For a decade after the war, at an engineering firm, she led crews that designed power transformers for General Electric. In the 1950s she married and started a family, while beginning to write books and articles and to teach interior and construction design. In the 1980s, she became a project, construction and building manager and then was President, Chief Executive Officer and co-owner of Niton Corporation, an environmental science company. She has been Co-Chair of the Lyceum Society since 2001.

Romm was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the daughter of David Melvin Grodzins and his wife Taube Grodzins. She grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, and graduated from Manchester Central High School in 1942. Her brother is physicist Lee Grodzins, and her sister was librarian and library science expert Anne Grodzins Lipow.

Upon graduating from high school, Romm was trained as a mechanical engineering draftsman at Bausch Machine Tool Company in Massachusetts. With many men away from home serving in the war, she was quickly hired by the U.S. Air Force at Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts as a civilian draftsman, where she stayed for the rest of World War II, becoming a project supervisor. After the war, she worked for Associate Engineers, Inc., in Agawam, Massachusetts, from 1946 to 1954, and headed crews that designed power transformers for General Electric. She then married newspaper reporter Al Romm (1926–1999) and moved, in 1957, to Middletown, New York, where her husband became the first editor of the Times Herald-Record newspaper and later vice president for news of Ottaway Newspapers. The couple had three sons, David, the host and producer of Shockwave Radio Theater on KFAI-FM; Daniel, a physician; and Joseph, a writer, physicist and climate expert.

...
Wikipedia