Kathryn A. McCarthy (August 7, 1924 – December 24, 2014)[1] was an American physicist who studied "the physical, optical and thermal properties of optical crystalline materials", became the youngest faculty member ever hired at Tufts University and, later, became the first woman to serve as provost at Tufts.
[1] She majored in mathematics at Tufts, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B.
[2] In 1967, McCarthy was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
[2][3] On her retirement in 1994, the triennial Kathryn A. McCarthy Lectureship in Physics was established at Tufts in her honor.
[2][5][3] Past lecturers have included Laurie McNeil (2000), Frances Hellman (2004), Laura Greene (2007), Deborah S. Jin (2010), Susan Coppersmith (2013), Meg Urry (2016), and Xiaowei Zhuang (2019).