Salwa Chukri Nassar was from Dhour-el-Shweir, and attended Brummana High School and the American Junior College for Women in Beirut.
She completed doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 1945, where she was the eighth woman to earn a PhD in physics.
Nassar's academic publications included research articles with titles such as "Cascade Showers and Mesotron-Produced Secondaries in Lead" (1946),[5] but also broader essays on higher education, such as "The Wonders of Creativity" (1962).
[6] She was responsible for building the physics department's resources of laboratory equipment, and a founder of the Lebanese Institute for Scientific Research.
She was named head of the physics department at AUB in 1965, the same year she became the first Lebanese president of the Beirut College for Women.