In memoriam: Barbara A. Jones 1960-2024
It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Barbara A. Jones on September 24, 2024. Born in Indianapolis on May 28, 1960 to Hugh M. and Johanna M. Jones, Barbara was educated in the Indianapolis public school system, Harvard University (A. B.) and completed Part III of the Math Tripos at Cambridge University, where she was a Churchill scholar. She did her Ph.D. at Cornell University under the supervision of John Wilkins and in collaboration with Chandra Varma, then at Bell Laboratories. The ``Jones-Varma” critical point, which she discovered in the course of her thesis research, remains an influential concept to this day. Following a postdoc at Harvard, she spent her professional career at the IBM Almaden research laboratory where she did important work on spintronics, quantum computing and viral evolution. She was a tireless advocate for broadening participation in science, serving for many years on the American Physical Society Committee on the Status of Women in Physics and launching a joint American Physical Society/IBM Almaden internship program for underrepresented groups. Dedicated to connecting academic and industrial science, with James Freericks she established a program which enabled graduate students from Georgetown University to spend a year at IBM. She made important contributions to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where she served as Chair of the Physics Section (B) from 2021-2024 and to the American Physical Society, particularly the Division of Condensed Matter Physics where she served as Chair in 2012-13 and more recently led, with Susan Coppersmith, a task force to improve the ``March Meeting”, the society’s main venue for scientific communication. She is survived by her son, David A. Kessler and her brother, Clifford B. Jones. Her husband, Alan Kessler, predeceased her.