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
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
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]