Sharon Gail Glendinning is an American experimental physicist. Glendinning completed her bachelor degree in experimental physics at

Middlebury College Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college in Middlebury, Vermont. Founded in 1800 by Congregationalists, Middlebury was the first operating college or university in Vermont. The college currently enrolls 2,858 undergraduates from all ...

in 1973, and graduated from

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

seven years later with a doctorate in the same field of study. She published the dissertation ''Elastic and Inelastic Neutron Scattering Cross Sections for ¹⁰B, ¹¹B, and ¹⁶O''. Glendinning remained at Duke to conduct postdoctoral research, and subsequently worked for

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...

within the nuclear fuels division. In 1985, she joined the

inertial confinement fusion Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is a fusion energy process that initiates nuclear fusion reactions by compressing and heating targets filled with thermonuclear fuel. In modern machines, the targets are small spherical pellets about the size of ...

program at

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

(LLNL). Glendinning received the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research from the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

in 1995. Three years later, the APS elected her a fellow, " r clear and illuminating experimental investigations of ablation-front Rayleigh-Taylor instability, laser imprinting, and nonlinear hydrodynamic instabilities relevant to inertial confinement fusion, high energy-density physics and astrophysics." Glendinning retired from LLNL after 2020.

References

American experimental physicists 21st-century American physicists American women physicists Living people Middlebury College alumni Duke University alumni 20th-century American physicists Year of birth missing (living people) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory staff Fellows of the American Physical Society 21st-century American women scientists 20th-century American women scientists General Electric employees American plasma physicists {{US-physicist-stub