Deborah Jin ’90

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.