Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, professor of Astronomy, will be the first woman to occupy an open endowed chair at the University. Other appointments announced yesterday include two new members of the Board of Preachers to replace Frederick May Eliot, deceased, and Sidney Lovett, who resigned recently.

The only other woman with an endowed chair at Harvard is Cora Du Bois, the Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor of Anthropology. This professorship, however, is limited to women. Mrs. Payne Gaposchkin will be Phillips Professor of Astronomy, a professorship which honors Phillips as "the first major benefactor of astronomy at Harvard."

The Board of Preachers will reach its full complement of six members again, as the result of the appointment of Wallace Woodsome Robbins and Frederick Mayer Meek, announced last night by Rev. George A. Buttrick, Preacher to the University. Both appointments were made with the unanimous concurrence of the present members of the Board.

Men of "Stature"

Buttrick stated that both of the new Members are men of great "stature and gifts." Robbins, Minister of the First Unitarian Church, Worcester, is former associate dean of the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago. Meek, who is senior Minister of Old South Church (Congregational), Boston, is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Andover Newton Theological Seminary.