Marjorie Diane Blasius Corcoran (1950 – February 3, 2017) was an American particle physicist who worked as a professor at Rice University.[1]
Born as Marjorie Blasius, she grew up in Beavercreek, Ohio, and was 1968 co-valedictorian of Beavercreek High School.[2] She earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1972 from the University of Dayton, graduating summa cum laude,[3] and in the same year married Christopher Corcoran, taking his surname.[4] As a graduate student at Indiana University Bloomington, she began doing high-energy physics research at Fermilab.[1] Her 1977 doctoral dissertation, Measurement of the polarization parameter in proton-proton elastic scattering for beam momenta ranging from 20 GeV/c to 200 GeV/c, was supervised by Homer Neal.[5] She joined the Rice University faculty in 1980.[1]
She died while bicycling on February 3, 2017 in Houston, from a collision with a METRORail train.[1]
As a professor at Rice, Corcoran continued her work at Fermilab as part of several large collaborative physics projectsincluding the D0 experiment, KTeV collaboration, and muon-to-electron-conversion experiment.
She also worked in physics outreach activities that included founding the Houston QuarkNet Program for high school physics students and teachers, helping to found a Women in Physics Group at Rice, sending undergraduates to physics conferences, and otherwise encouraging other women to participate in physics.
In 1992, the American Physical Society (APS) named her as a fellow "for contributions to experiments studying spin asymmetries in hadronic collision".[6] In 2015, the APS listed her as their January 2015 Woman of the Month.[7]