Deborah grew up in Florida, near Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. After studying physics at Princeton, Deborah earned her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1995.
A pioneer in polar molecular quantum chemistry, Deborah worked on some of the earliest studies characterizing the gas known as Bose-Einstein condensate. In 2003, Deborah’s team at JILA made the first fermionic condensate, a new form of matter. She used magnetic traps and lasers to cool fermionic atomic gases to less than 100 billionths of a degree above zero Kelvin.
In 2005, Deborah became the second-youngest woman ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Her other honors included a 2003 MacArthur fellowship and the 2013 L’Oreal/Unesco For Women in Science award for North America.
At the time of her death, Deborah was a fellow with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an adjunct professor in the department of physics at the University of Colorado, and a fellow of JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) — a NIST joint laboratory with the University of Colorado.
Deborah died Sept. 15, 2016, of cancer in Boulder, Colo. She is survived by her husband, John Bohn, also a JILA scientist; daughter Jaclyn; mother Shirley Jin; sister Laural Jin O’Dowd; and brother Craig Jin.