Mary Kaiser

Mary Agnes Kaiser (June 11, 1948 – July 10, 2011) was an American chemist. She worked at E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company, where she was the first woman promoted to Senior Research Fellow. A woman scientist of distinction, she was internationally known for her work in environmental analytical chemistry.

Kaiser was born in Pittston, Pennsylvania on June 11, 1948, to Fredolin Kaiser and Agnes Regina Searfoss Kaiser and grew up in Exeter, Pennsylvania. She attended Wilkes College for her Bachelor's degree in chemistry, where she graduated in 1970. She received her Master's degree from Saint Joseph's University in 1972, and she completed her PhD in Chemistry at Villanova University in 1976. Subsequently, she spent a year as a Graham Perdue Fellow at the University of Georgia, where she worked with Professor Lockhart Burgess (Buck) Rogers.

In 1977, Kaiser began working for DuPont, where she was the first woman to be promoted to the level of Senior Research Fellow. Kaiser was an active member of the American Chemical Society, the Chromatography Forum of the Delaware Valley, the Eastern Analytical Symposium, and the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies. In 1985, she was the second woman ever elected Chair of the American Chemical Society's Division of Analytical Chemistry. She is the only person to have served as the President of the Eastern Analytical Symposium and as Chair of the Governing Board of the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies. For her work in environmental chemistry at the DuPont Company, she became internationally known for the analysis of fluorine compounds in the environment.

In 1982 Kaiser and Professor Robert L. Grob published Environmental Problem Solving Using Gas Chromatography. The book became a best-seller within the field.

Kaiser married Cecil Dybowski in 1979, with whom she had a daughter, Marta Dybowski, born in 1987. Kaiser died on July 10, 2011, in Newark, Delaware.

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