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Deborah K. Watson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deborah Kay Watson is an American physicist known for her work on the many-body problem in quantum mechanics.[1] She is a professor emerita of physics at the University of Oklahoma.[2]

Education and career

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Watson is a 1972 graduate of Allegheny College and completed her Ph.D. in chemistry in 1977 at Harvard University.[2] Her dissertation was in two parts, I. Time-dependent Hartree–Fock studies of small molecular systems and II. Adiabatic and resonance states of Li2 and dissociative recombination of Li2+, and was supervised by Alexander Dalgarno.[3]

Watson was a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology before joining the University of Oklahoma faculty.[4] She served two terms as chair of the Theoretical Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics Community of the American Physical Society (APS), in 2005–2006 and 2006–2007.[5] She retired from the University of Oklahoma in 2016.[6]

Recognition

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Watson was named the Edith Kinney Gaylor Presidential Professor of Physics at the University of Oklahoma in 2004.[7]

In 2020 she was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society, after a nomination from the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics, "for the innovative use of group theory and graphical techniques toward the solution of the quantum many-body problem".[1]

References

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  1. ^ a b "2020 Fellows nominated by the Division of Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics", APS Fellows Archive, retrieved 2020-11-10
  2. ^ a b Deborah Watson, professor, emeritus, University of Oklahoma Homer L. Dodge Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, retrieved 2020-11-10
  3. ^ Deborah K. Watson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ Information for students (PDF), Caltech, 1979–1980, p. 100, retrieved 2020-11-10
  5. ^ List of Chairs and Secretaries of TAMOC, APS Division of Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics, retrieved 2020-11-10
  6. ^ List of Retirees for 2016, University of Oklahoma College of Arts and Sciences, retrieved 2020-11-10
  7. ^ "Faculty honored" (PDF), Φyast Φlyer, vol. 12, no. 2, University of Oklahoma Homer L. Dodge Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, p. 2, Spring 2004
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