Beatriz Levi

Beatriz Levi Dresner (6 April 1930 – 22 January 2022) was a Chilean mining engineer. A refugee from Benito Mussolini's fascist regime, she became interested in earth sciences as a student at the University of Chile School of Engineering and became one of Chile's first woman mining engineers. She later worked for CORFO and, due to the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, later fled to Sweden, where she became part of the Stockholm University faculty.

Biography

She was born on 6 April 1930 in Milan, Italy, to Chilean-Jewish immigrants who returned to the country in 1939 due to Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. Originally living in Valparaiso and educated at Liceo de Niñas de Viña del Mar, she later moved to Santiago, where she was educated at Liceo 3. While educated at the University of Chile School of Engineering, she became interested in earth sciences as a student of Jorge Muñoz Cristi and studied mining engineering and geology, eventually obtaining her mining engineering degree there in 1958 and becoming one of Chile's first woman mining engineers. While educated at the University of California at Berkeley, she became Chile's first geoscientist to get an overseas PhD; her dissertation, ''Cretaceous volcanic rocks from a part of the Coast Range west from Santiago, Chile: A study in lithologic variation and burial metamorphism in the Andean Geosyncline'' (1968) was supervised by Francis John Turner.

After joining CORFO's Mining and Fuels Department, she worked for the Geological Research Institute, where she worked on a geological survey map and was head of their Petrography Laboratory. In 1964, she became the first woman to be a board member of the Chilean Institute of Mining Engineers. In 1970, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "studies in igneous and metamorphic petrology". She was awarded the 1988 Medalla al Mérito "Juan Brüggen" for services to Chilean geology and elected honorary member of the Chilean Institute of Mining Engineers in 1994.

She moved to the University of Chile Department of Geology in 1967, where she became a research professor of geology and an expert in the Fedoroff plate. She started studying magmatism and plate tectonics in Central Chile in the early-1970s, and she worked as head of the IIG's Exploration Department from 1971 to 1973 as part of the Allende presidency's nationalization of the copper mines and in 1974 started their ''Andean Geology'' academic journal. After she fled Chile due to the 1973 Chilean coup d'état (she was an Allende supporter), she taught at a Costa Rica university on a research grant and eventually settled in Sweden, where she became part of the Stockholm University faculty and met her life partner until her death, geologist Jan Nyström. Despite remaining in Sweden until her death, she continued doing research in her native Chile and collaborating with other Chilean researchers, "all this at a time when funding for scientific research in Chile was extremely difficult".

She had two children with her husband José Valenzuela: a daughter, Silvana; and a son, , a militant who was killed in the Operation Albania massacre in 1987. She and her husband traveled around the world out of an interest in ancient civilizations.

She died on 22 January 2022 in Stockholm.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Levi, Beatriz

1930 births
2022 deaths
Chilean mining engineers
20th-century Chilean geologists
Chilean women geologists
20th-century Chilean engineers
Chilean women engineers
University of Chile alumni
University of California, Berkeley alumni
Academic staff of the University of Chile
Academic staff of Stockholm University
Chilean exiles
Chilean expatriates in Sweden
Chilean expatriates in the United States
Refugees in Sweden
Expatriate academics in the United States
Italian exiles
Jewish refugees
Chilean people of Italian-Jewish descent
Italian people of Chilean descent