I moved to Rockford involuntarily in 2013. My entire life and plan for my life was a vision of physics education in the Chicago suburbs — the home of two national labs, Fermi Lab and Argonne, the homes of discoveries like the proton and solar wind and or course the atomic bomb and even the internet.

I also developed a fierce passion for creating support networks for women in physics. I was never oblivious to the fact that Chicago was a unique place for physics. Nor was I oblivious to the fact that this was very much out of the norm for the rest of the nation.

According to national data from the department of education two out of five high schools do not offer physics. From the little I knew of Rockford at the time I had no expectations that physics would be centered in my life. I was very wrong. Not only is there a rich history in this city, that history is grounded in the excellence of women of the past and present.

I knew that the Illinois Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers was the oldest state section of the national organization in the country. I decided to poke around in the journal archives and ran across a short piece about the history of the section, penned in 1962.

The piece described how the section was formed at a gathering of physics faculty from around the state at Rockford College. The author of the piece was a woman by the name of Frances Johnson. Of course, I had to learn more.

I could not find much about Johnson through an initial google search, other than the fact that Rockford University had a scholarship in her name, so I searched the archives at RU, and I couldn’t believe what I found.

The history of Rockford College was to establish a school where women could receive just as rigorous of an education as men. Johnson was one of the first women to receive her Ph.D. in physics in 1921. Thirty-five Ph.D.s were conferred that year and Johnson was the only woman.

She spoke seven languages and taught at a girls school set up by the American Association of University Women in Istanbul, Turkey prior to coming to Rockford.

In 1927, she joined the faculty at Rockford College where she remained for 34 years. She chaired a national conference at the college where Enrico Fermi himself was keynote, developed a radioisotope lab at the college, and due to her work was invited to one of the last nuclear surface explosions in Nevada.

She was involved with every science and physics organization you could name and was a charter member of the Rockford section of the American Association of University Women.

Dorothy Baits, 93, of Rockford, remembers her fondly “not as my professor, but my friend.” Dorothy was able to conduct research in radioactive isotopes under Johnson, and Johnson even arranged for Dorothy to go up to Mayo in Rochester for some of the work. Dorothy graduated from Rockford College with honors and degrees in both math and physics in 1951.

A little over a decade in Rockford I am proud to say that I am part of this legacy in this city.

The current physics faculty at Rockford University, Deepshikha Shukla, associate vice president for business innovation, dean for the college of Professional and Extended Learning and professor of physics is equally dynamic as an educator and an advocate for underrepresented groups in physics.

She and I have become close as we collaborate to enhance physics education in the city between the high school and the college.

Deepshikha created a course at Rockford University that many of the Rockford pathway pre-service teachers take to help support their teaching of physics at the elementary level.

I had the privilege of teaching this course in 2023. Between the two of us we have had numerous student pursue physics majors, minors and become physics educators.

Rockford continues to be a hidden gem of physics education in the state of Illinois, and I am so grateful to be a part of it.

Marianna Ruggerio is a physics teacher at Auburn High School in Rockford, an adjunct professor at Rockford University, a member-at-large of the American Association of Physics Teachers executive board and a high school representative to the Chicago Section AAPT.

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Your turn: Rockford is a home for physics excellence and women in STEM