Simpson Mrs. Agar

During our time frame, the most prominent woman researcher in the Cambridge Chemistry Laboratories was the spectro-scopist, Delia Margaret Simpson.47 Bom on 5 February 1912 in London, the daughter of Robert Simpson, a sanitary inspector, and Delia Maud Pope, a teacher, she was educated at the Haberdashers Aske s Hatcham Girls School. Simpson entered Newnham in 1930, completing her studies in 1934. 

Simpson was a Bathurst Research Student from 1934 to 1936, following which, with a Travelling Scholarship, she spent 1937 to 1939 undertaking research at the University of Vienna. Her initial research had been in the field of optical rotary dispersion and circular dichroism, but she discovered that she found spectroscopy much more interesting. Before the Second World War, she studied the spectra of small molecules in the vacuum ultraviolet but with the onset of war, she shifted to infrared spectroscopy. This technique was used to analyse samples of enemy fuels for the Air Ministry, in particular to identify the use of synthetic oils in place of natural oil, which, because of the naval blockades, was in very short supply in Germany. 

This war work was undertaken with the women chemists of Bedford. As discussed in Chap. 4, Bedford personnel and students had been evacuated to Cambridge, and for the duration of their stay Simpson held the position of Demonstrator and Assistant Lecturer in Chemistry for Bedford College. Following the departure of the Bedford students in 1944, she was appointed as College Lecturer in Chemistry at Newnham and was elected to a Teaching Fellowship. 

Simpson continued research after the war, working for a time with biologists on fluorescence spectroscopy. Her major focus continued to be infrared and Raman spectroscopy, resulting in a total of 20 papers over her career, including a two-part review of the spectra of hydrocarbons in Quarterly Reviews of the Chemical Society. However, in 1954, she was appointed as the Director of Studies in Natural Sciences, which required her 

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