Beatriz Cougnet was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, but her parents, Fausto and Susana, were both Argentine citizens so she was raised in Argentina since the age of one. She studied physics and mathematics at the
University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and obtained her M.Sc. degree on 18 December 1952. When the Argentine Atomic Energy Commission was created, Cougnet was one of the first four researchers hired to work on high-energy fundamental particle physics. Juana M. Cardoso, Adulio Cichini, Horacio Ghielmetti,
Emma V. Pérez Ferreira,
Juan G. Roederer and Pedro Waloschek. She also served as thesis director for a local doctoral student researching nuclear reactions recorded at the
Bevatron particle accelerator in
Berkeley, California. Cougnet conducted research on cosmic radiation at the Nuclear Plates Laboratory of the
National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA) in Argentina, around 1950, laying the groundwork for the founding of the National Center for Cosmic Radiation (now called the Institute of Astronomy and Space Physics, IAFE) at the University of Buenos Aires in 1960. At the end of 1949, Cougnet went to Germany and visited the laboratory of
Werner Heisenberg at the
Max Planck Institute in
Göttingen where she learned about the work with nuclear emulsions directed by Martin Teucher. In 1950–1951, Cougnet and Juan Roederer, still students, exposed nuclear plates with photographic emulsions at high altitudes in the
Andes mountains of Argentina. In that way, they obtained the second reported detection of
subatomic particles called
pi mesons, or
pions. In early 1953, Cougnet and Roederer undertook the last expedition to expose emulsions at higher geomagnetic latitudes, on the slopes of the
Lanín volcano near
Bariloche, Argentina. In June 1966, the political landscape in Argentina turned dangerous because of the
coup d'état, so she and Roederer emigrated to Colorado in the United States with their four children and three surviving parents. In 1977, Roederer accepted the position of director of the
Geophysical Institute of the
University of Alaska, in
Fairbanks, prompting Cougnet, Roederer and a few family members to move again. Later, after living in Alaska for 37 years, Cougnet and Roederer were asked by their children to move back to Colorado. == Personal life ==