Julia A. Thompson

Julia A. Thompson, who made contributions to many important subfields in experimental particle physics, particularly in the area of weak interactions, died in an automobile accident on 16 August 2004 in Wood River, Illinois. During her career, Julia participated in experiments at several particle accelerator laboratories, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN, and Russia’s Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk. She had been working on the MINOS experiment at Fermilab at the time of her death.

Born on 13 March 1943, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Julia graduated from Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, in 1964 with a BA in physics. She earned her MS from Yale University in 1966. Three years later, she received her PhD from Yale in the field of elementary particle physics under the joint supervision of J. Sandweiss and one of us (Willis), with a thesis entitled “An Isospin Conservation Test from K-p Interactions at 400 MeV/c.”

In 1972 Julia joined the faculty of the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. She was affiliated with the university for the remainder of her career. She was a dedicated teacher of undergraduate students and a strong proponent of involving them in her research activities. During her career, she supervised some 60 undergraduate student researchers, some of whom became coauthors on her publications. In 1992 she founded Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Physics—Focus on Minorities, a program that placed undergraduate students in research groups during the summer months. Funding from NSF and the support of her university and department—which provided her with released time from teaching—along with enthusiastic participation of her university colleagues, made the program a success.

In 1988 Julia decided to join the CMD2 project, a new experiment at the low-energy e⁺e⁻ collider VEPP-2M at Novosibirsk. She recognized at once the potential to study charge conjugation–parity violation (CP) in the kaon system and spent a sabbatical year, 1989–90, developing her ideas. She made plans for a comprehensive study of phi decays to kaon pairs, including a realistic estimate of possible systematic effects.

It was rare at that time for Western physicists to work for extended periods in Novosibirsk, particularly during the winter months, and to do so was logistically and ideologically complicated. As the era of the Soviet Union was drawing to a close, there were shortages of food and essential items; Julia, along with her Russian colleagues, endured those shortages during an unusually cold winter. Such difficulties did not discourage her from becoming a regular visitor to Novosibirsk. Her final doctoral student carried out a study of tagged decays of charged kaons in the CMD2 experiment, which permitted Julia to see her original ideas come to fruition. She spoke fluent Russian, which she often used for presentations at seminars in Novosibirsk, and always traveled with a book of Russian poetry.

In 1999 during a visit to South Africa, Julia took the initiative to contact the education ministry in Cape Town and visit several high schools to learn about their physics programs. (The photograph above shows Julia speaking to high-school students at a career fair near Cape Town in 2002.) She spoke to a number of local physicists interested in outreach to high schools; after the end of apartheid, high schools had greatly expanded in scope. Her efforts subsequently led to NSF-supported programs at several US universities to send teams of physicists, teachers, and undergraduates to high schools in South Africa to help initiate programs that would enhance hands-on physics training. The programs are now sustained through the efforts of local education ministries and scientists.

In 2000–02 Julia established and directed a Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville as a satellite of the Pittsburgh program. In 2002 she initiated QuarkNet activities, partly through her research program at the University of Pittsburgh and partly through a cosmic-ray program based at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Specifically, as part of this nationwide outreach program, Julia worked with high-school teachers and students in the St. Louis area to build cosmic-ray detectors that would be placed in high schools and to organize the data collection so that the data obtained from different sites could be combined. She was appointed adjunct professor of physics at Missouri in 2003.

Julia was active in the American Physical Society, where she served on a number of committees that addressed issues concerning the participation of both women and minorities in physics. She took a special interest in African American students in her own programs and was in regular contact with the National Society of Black Physicists. She frequently gave talks on both her physics research and outreach activities at the NSBP’s annual meetings.

Julia was a dedicated scientist and teacher whose work was interrupted at the height of her career. She is missed by a large number of students, colleagues, and collaborators from around the world. She is remembered as a tireless and tenacious physicist, a compassionate and caring individual, and, above all, a champion for the underprivileged.