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For most of her career, Maria Goeppert Mayer worked “just for the fun of doing physics,” without pay or status or a tenured position. She was 58 before she became a full professor. And yet she made major contributions to the growing understanding of nuclear physics. In 1949 Goeppert Mayer and her co-laureate Hans Jensen developed a model in which nucleons were distributed in shells with different energy levels. The model reflected observations of directions in which nucleons rotated around their own axes and around the center of the nucleus. It could be compared visually to an onion. Goeppert Mayer subsequently received the name ‘the Onion Madonna’ by Nobel Prize laureate Wolfgang Pauli for her discovery. Here you can see Goeppert Mayer with her Nobel Prize medal that she received in 1963 for her discovery concerning nuclear shell structure. In her Nobel Prize lecture she spoke about her revolutionary discovery. Read her full Nobel Prize lecture by clicking the link in our bio. Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images #NobelPrize #NobelPrizelaureate #womeninscience