Marjorie Corcoran

Marjorie Corcoran, a particle physicist at Rice University, died on 3 February at age 66.

Marjorie (Blasius) Corcoran was born in 1950 and grew up in Ohio. She studied physics at the University of Dayton and graduated summa cum laude in 1972 with a Bachelor of Science, the same year she married her husband, Christopher Corcoran. She did her doctoral work at Indiana University under Homer Neal, investigating the polarization parameter in proton–proton elastic scattering, using data taken at Fermilab. Her PhD was awarded in 1977. After two years of postdoctoral study at the University of Wisconsin, she joined the faculty of Rice University in 1980, where she made important contributions to physics research, the education of students, and the life of the university. She was awarded an Outstanding Junior Investigator Grant from the US Department of Energy in 1980. She chaired the physics department from 1994 to 1998 and was the first speaker of Rice’s Faculty Senate when it was formed in 2005. Except for a Visiting Professor position at the University of Chicago supported by the National Science Foundation in 1990, Marj’s entire faculty career was at Rice.

Most of Marj’s research in particle physics was conducted at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside of Chicago. The added bonus was that this let her leave Houston during the blistering heat of July and August. She was the spokesperson of E683, and she participated in KTeV, DZero, and, most recently, Mu2e. She chaired the DZero Institutional Board from 2008 to 2009.

Her research focused on CP violation, tests of fundamental symmetries, and searches for physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. She was a co-convener of the DZero physics group that studies particles containing the bottom quark, and she also convened the DZero group to determine the experiment’s luminosity. Corcoran’s interest in physics beyond the Standard Model led her to join the Mu2e experiment, which will search for lepton flavor violating decays of the muon. Over the course of her career, she coauthored more than 500 publications.

In addition to the generations of undergraduate students that she taught, she supervised eight successful doctoral students, including one of us (Lincoln). The doctoral students she supervised have gone on to a diverse set of careers, including a researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a program manager at DOE, a faculty member at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, as well as several industrial positions.

Her external service work included serving on the Texas National Research Laboratory Research and Development Panel in 1990–1992, and she served on the British Marshall Scholarship Review Panel, Southwest Region, from 1997 through 2011. She served on the Fermilab Users Executive Committee from 1987 to 1989 and 2010 to 2011. She was a member of the Fermilab Board of Overseers in 1997–2004 and was a member of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) in 1997–2000. She also served on the executive committee for the Division of Particles and Fields for the American Physical Society from 2010 to 2013.

For her many important contributions to physics, Marj was made a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1992. Another honor she received was the Distinguished Scientist Award from the University of Wisconsin Physics Department in 2008. She worked tirelessly with students and educators and participated in the ongoing Quarknet high school teacher development program, which began at Rice in 2004. Corcoran was a strong advocate for women in science. Early in 2017, she co-organized a Rice-hosted, APS-sponsored Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics. In January 2015 the American Physical Society named her “Woman Physicist of the Month” and noted that she was “a leader in the particle physics community and a great role model for women in physics.”

Marj’s death was a terrible shock and she will be dearly missed by all those who knew her. She was highly respected within the department, the university, and the entire physics community, and she was a role model and mentor to many in the world of particle physics. Marj is survived by her husband Chris; daughter Colleen, son-in-law Stephen Villavaso, and granddaughter Juno; son Craig and his fiancée Betny Townsend; and son Conner. She also left behind two brothers, as well as their families.