This site celebrates the life of Ina B. Alterman, the eminent geologist, women’s rights advocate, humanitarian and beloved parent, grandparent, sister, aunt and friend who passed away on February 19, 2021 at the age of 91.
Born to a traditional Jewish family of modest means, Ina was not encouraged to attend college or have a career. Nevertheless, Ina obtained a Ph.D. in the hardest of hard sciences, Geology, and rose to become one of the most important women scientists of her time. She had far too many accomplishments to fit in
one short description, but this summary will serve as a temporary memorial, while more features and facts about her life are added to the site.
Ina B. Alterman was born on December 2, 1929, the only girl in a family of second generation Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn NY. She attended James Madison HS, where among other things she was a 5’2″ basketball star and was known as a terrific dancer.
In 1947 she graduated and briefly entertained the idea of
becoming a popular singer, recording some 78 rpm disks and creating head shots that flaunted her screen-ready beauty.
Instead, she became the first woman in the family to attend college, initially Elmhurst College in Illinois, supporting herself on her income as a waitress. This led to work at Grocinger’s, the famous Jewish resort in the Catskills.
In 1953 she married Hyman Alterman, a statistician for the New York State Department of Labor; they traveled to Europe, where Hyman had earned an advanced degree in mathematics from the Sorbonne in Paris. When they returned, having taken one drawing class at Elmhurst, Ina took an interest in art and executed a series of about a dozen oil paintings of near-professional quality, from a stunningly accurate portrait of Hyman to the steps of Monmartre to a local jazz concert.
Her first child, Anton (called Tony) was born in 1954, and her second, Ian, four years later. Ina was already on to new pursuits, studying the cello and learning quickly. By 1959 she was again a student, and though her third child, Eric, was born in 1960, she completed her Bachelor of Science by 1963, graduating Magna Cum Laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the most prestigious academic honor society in the U.S. She then obtained admission to the highly selective graduate program in Geological Sciences at Columbia University.
While raising three children, she completed her doctoral thesis, studying an important rock formation in Pennsylvania known as the “Hamburg klippe”. In 1971 she and another female student became the 7th and 8th women to receive the Ph.D. from Columbia in Earth Sciences.
Ina took a teaching job at Herbert Lehman College, CUNY, and soon she became the first tenured female professor of geology at Lehman. One summer she was accepted into a NASA fellowship program, and became, according to NASA, one of the first scientists to utilize their “remote sensing” technology, based on the new Landstat satellite mapping.
In 1976 her marriage to Hyman ended. A few years later she accepted a position with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and moved to the Washington, D.C. area, where she remained until her retirement. At the NRC she was responsible for geological evaluation of the siting of ten nuclear reactors. A few years later she moved to the Department of Energy, where she conducted the geological investigation of the proposed site for a high-level radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Her responsibility for the siting of the nation’s nuclear waste repositories continued at the National Research Council. There she led a study that settled a very public controversy regarding the geological stability of the Yucca Mountain site, a critical step in opening the repository. In an all too typical historical irony, the scientific gadfly who raised the objections got sympathetic write-ups in numerous major media outlets, and the Governor of Nevada wielded his work in an effort to get the project canceled; Ina, a woman and structural geologist who actually understood the science of the area, got little if any recognition. The site is still not open (as of February 2022) but the scientific issue was settled by Ina’s study many years ago. She also investigated a proposed low-level storage site at Ward Valley, CA, which was not built due to the objections of Native American tribes, and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for defense-related nuclear waste at Carlsbad, NM, which is now in use.
As the scientist personally responsible for the evaluation of geological conditions at ten proposed nuclear power plant sites and three (two actually built) radioactive waste storage sites, Ina carried the highest level of responsibility a scientist could have for the safety and security of the entire nation.
As a final gesture, having retired from the NRC, Ina was called back to work once again with NASA on remote earth studies. She retired for good in 2000, though her independent geological work continued.
Not satisfied with her outstanding scientific achievements, while in D.C. Ina became active in women’s and gay rights causes. Noting a lack of social and intellectual forums for older gay women, she founded the Gay Women’s Alliance along with a group of other professionals, and then, with her partner at the time,
founded a D.C. chapter of SAGE, then known as Senior Action in a Gay Environment. She continued to support progressive women’s organizations and political candidacies throughout her life.
Ina traveled all over the world, beginning with a motorbike tour of Europe with Hyman before her first child was born. Later she and the family took two lengthy cross-country trips with a camper for shelter, visiting natural wonders from Niagara Falls to Yellowstone National Park to Craters of the Moon in Idaho. Aside from her work-related travel all over the country, she went to Israel and Egypt, visited Machu Pichu in Peru, and many other places.
At age 79 she was invited by Anton and his wife Hui, a native of Hefei, China, to visit her hometown and tour Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Xi’an. A highlight of the trip was a visit to the Djuzhaigou national park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the outstanding natural areas in the world. With her extensive mountain-climbing experience in the course of her geological work, Ina managed the thin air and lengthy trails, which descend from an elevation of over 8,000 feet. (The site’s background picture was taken at the magnificent colored pools at Huanglong, where Ina was not up to the climb from 10,000 to 12,000 feet. But these pools are Ina’s favorite color!) She, Hui and Anton also saw the world-famous Chengdu Opera and the Panda Reserve, climbed the Great Wall, and visited the Terracotta Army, another World Heritage Site.
This brief summary can hardly capture the fullness of the life of Ina B. Alterman. But even in a summary it cannot be forgotten that aside from all that she did professionally and politically, time after time she was at the side of one family member or another who needed assistance. Just before the end of her life, at the age of 90, during a pandemic, she got on a train from South Florida, where she was living, and went to New York to help her brother who was stricken with leukemia. Only after he went into remission did she come back home, another dramatic act of healing and self-sacrifice to her credit. Her willingness to care for others was as characteristic of her life as her belief in the scientific method, her confidence that she could be what she wanted to be, and her insistence on the equality of women.
Those who knew her, even for a short time, will love and remember Ina forever. Her longevity permitted her to become a beloved grandparent to Anton’s three children, Emily, Adrian and Zoe. As she left her circle of friends in New York, and then D.C., moving to Delray Beach, FL, her network only grew. People would meet her and never forget the octagenarian scientist who could dance the Lindy Hop, speak authoritatively on a wide range of scientific and archaeological subjects, discuss politics like a Washington insider, appreciate Latin dance music and Borodin’s String Quartet #2, and drive a sports car up and down the East Coast.
From the time of her trip to Egypt and Israel, Ina developed a fanatical interest in archaeology. Her house was filled with books and magazines on ancient history, and pictures of Egyptian princesses adorned many walls. She could speak with confidence about Egyptian and Biblical history and the modern debates about the Dead Sea scrolls and the like.
Ina was one of the most accomplished women in America, and she greatly admired and respected other women who managed to accomplish great things in a world dominated by men. At various points in her life her friends included the artist Betty Guy, the violinist Shulamith Silber (a student of renowned violinist and composer Georges Enesco), the poet Audre Lorde, the historian and biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt Blanche Wiesen Cook, and other prominent women. A photograph of Ina at the 1994 WISE (Women In Science and Engineering) lecture is in a collection of photographs taken by Vera Rubin, the astronomer who established the first evidence for dark matter. Ina is one of the few non-astronomers in the Rubin collection, which is probably no coincidence: two of Rubin’s sons are geologists, Ina had worked with NASA, and both women were closely connected with the National Academy of Sciences.
In the future we will be improving this web site with more details about Ina, photographs and videos, personal reminiscences and more. Thank you for reading.