Marjorie Corcoran

Marjorie Diane Blasius Corcoran (July 21, 1950 – February 3, 2017) was an American particle physicist and professor at Rice University.

Biography Born as Marjorie Blasius, she grew up in Beavercreek, Ohio, graduating from Beavercreek High School as co-valedictorian in 1968. To begin her higher education, in 1972 she completed her bachelor's degree at the University of Dayton, graduating summa cum laude. That same year she married Christopher Corcoran, taking his surname. As a graduate student at Indiana University Bloomington, she began doing high-energy physics research at Fermilab. After earning her Ph.D. in 1977, Corcoran continued studies for 2 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She joined the Rice University faculty in 1980, where she would continue to teach for 37 years.

She died while bicycling to work on February 3, 2017, in Houston, from a collision with a METRORail train.

Contributions As a professor at Rice, Corcoran continued her work at Fermilab as part of several large collaborative physics projects including the D0 experiment, KTeV collaboration, and the muon-to-electron-conversion experiment. She was also awarded the Distinguished Scientist Award from the University of Wisconsin physics department in 2008.