Deborah S. Jin, a much-honored physicist who created and explored matter that exists only at a sliver of a degree above absolute zero — or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit — died on Sept. 15 2016 in Boulder, Colo. She was 47. In 2005, Dr. Jin became the second-youngest woman ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Her other honors included a 2003 MacArthur fellowship — the so-called genius award, with a no-strings-attached grant of $500,000 — and the 2013 L’Oreal/Unesco For Women in Science award for North America. She was mentioned as a potential candidate for a Nobel Prize. Dr. Jin, a daughter of two physicists, had earned her doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago when she moved to Boulder in 1995 to join the laboratory of Eric A. Cornell, a JILA scientist, as a postdoctoral researcher. Deborah Shiu-Lan Jin was born on Nov. 15, 1968, in Stanford, Calif. Her father was a physics professor at the Florida Institute of Technology; her mother was a physics-trained engineer. She grew up in Indian Harbour Beach, Fla., not far from Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton in 1990 before earning her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1995. Dr. Jin is survived by her husband, John Bohn, also a JILA scientist; their daughter, Jaclyn; her mother, Shirley Jin; a sister, Laural Jin O’Dowd; and a brother, Craig Jin.
| Types | Person, Academic |