Jungnickel was originally from Germany, one of three daughters of a German soldier who was lost in Russia during World War II.
Jungnickel herself began work after high school as a typist and later an accountant for a stock broker, while studying part-time at the University of San Francisco.
When Jungnickel fell ill of cancer in 1983,[1] McCormmach left academia and they moved to Eugene, Oregon,[2] where they remained until she died in 1990 of an unrelated heart condition.
[1] Jungnickel is best known for her two-volume work Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein (University of Chicago Press, 1986), which she coauthored with her husband Russell McCormmach.
It won the Pfizer Award in 1987, and was reprinted in a revised and shortened form as The Second Physicist: On the History of Theoretical Physics in Germany (Springer, 2017).