Erna Gibbs
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Early Life
Dr. Erna Leonhardt-Gibbs was born in 1904 in Germany. In 1928 she left Germany and immigrated to the United States.
Research and Career
Upon arrival in the United States in 1928, Dr. Leonhardt-Gibbs began work at Harvard University with Dr. William Lennox, measuring blood constituents in patients with epilepsy and normal controls, with Frederic Gibbs joining shortly afterward in 1929 [citation needed]. Erna and Frederic got married in 1930, and worked collaboratively on every project thereafter [citation needed].
In 1931, the Gibbses moved to the University of Pennsylvania to work for the Johnson Foundation [citation needed]. There, they worked together on a blood recorder machine and subsequently were the first to demonstrate that epileptic seizures were caused by electrical activity, and not a sudden loss of blood flow to the brain, as was the leading theory at the time [citation needed].
Though the EEG was primitive in the 1930s, having only one channel, the Gibbses wanted to try recording in epilepsy patients [citation needed]. In 1935, they published the first paper on the EEG patterns of human epilepsy patients. Frederic Gibbs approached Albert Grass, who worked at MIT, about designing a three-channel EEG machine [citation needed]. That summer, the Gibbses attended the International Congress of Physiologists in Leningrad and Moscow and visited Hans Berger, the inventor of the EEG [citation needed]. The three-channel EEG was finished by the time that they returned, and they were able to advance their research farther.
In the following years of research from 1935 to 1941, the Gibbses worked on creating the first Atlas on Electroencephalography, a manual on patterns to help other EEG researchers identify patterns [citation needed]. Erna Gibbs traced more than 100,000 EEGs for the atlas and methodologically maintained the EEG and clinical records [citation needed].
In 1944, the Gibbses moved to Chicago to work for the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute [citation needed]. Erna Gibbs began training technicians and scientists to read and record unipolar EEGs [citation needed].
Frederic Gibbs won the Mead Johnson Award in 1939 for the Gibbses work on the epilepsy blood recorder machine and the Lasker Award in 1957 for their work on epilepsy [citation needed]. Erna Gibbs is not listed for either award, despite her contributions. Erna Gibbs was named “Woman of the Year” by the American Women’s Association in 1958 [citation needed].