Barbara Whitten

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Barbara Lu Whitten (also published as Barbara Lu Whitten Wolfe) is a retired American physics educator and professor emerita of physics at Colorado College.[1] She is known for encouraging women in physics, for studying the factors that lead to the success of women in physics, and for promoting inclusive teaching strategies in physics; she has also worked in computational environmental physics.[2]

Education and career

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Whitten "fell madly in love" with physics at age 16,[3] and graduated from Carleton College in 1968.[1] She received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Rochester in 1977,[3] with the dissertation On Mechanical Quantum Measuring Processes, supervised by Gérard G. Emch.[4] Her doctoral research applied algebraic statistical mechanics to computational atomic physics,[3][1] a combination of topics she continued to study for many years.[3]

After teaching at Miami University and working as a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,[2] she joined the Physics Department at Colorado College as the first woman in its faculty. She retired in 2017.[1]

Recognition

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Whitten is the 2018 recipient of the Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers.[2]

References

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  3. ^ a b c d Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
  4. ^ Barbara Whitten at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

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