Ann E. Orel

Ann E. Orel is an American physical chemist and computational scientist who is Professor Emerita in chemical engineering at the University of California, Davis, and is affiliated with the Ultrafast X-Ray Science Laboratory at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She has published research in theoretical atomic and molecular physics and computational methods for molecular dynamics and electron scattering. In 2000, she was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Education Orel earned a BS in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1977 followed by a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981.

Career Orel served on the faculty at the University of California, Davis, including in leadership roles in the Department of Applied Sciences.

Service and professional activities Orel has served in elected or appointed roles within the American Physical Society, including listing as a General Councillor in APS governance materials.

In 2007, she criticized vague and inconsistently applied grant-review expectations as potentially counterproductive for early-career scientists and noted that women in physics could be treated as contributing to diversity “by existing.”

Honors and recognition

1980 – Anna Louise Hoffman Award for Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Research Fellow of the American Physical Society