Mary Laura Chalk Rowles (1904 – February 14, 1996) was a Canadian physicist and the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from McGill University.
[1] She is best known for having conducted an early experimental verification of Erwin Schrödinger's wave formulation of quantum mechanics with John Stuart Foster.
Upon graduation she won the Anne Molson Gold Medal for achievements in mathematics, science, and physics as well as a National Research Council Bursary.
was entitled "Potential distributions in the Crookes dark space and relative intensities of Stark effect components of H-β and He-λ" and was supervised by Otto Maass.
[6] Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Observed relative intensities of Stark components in hydrogen" and advised by John Stuart Foster.
[2] From 1929 to 1930, Rowles worked with Owen Willans Richardson at King's College London, where she conducted research on thermionic emission.