Lorella Jones

Lorella Jones died on February 9, 1995, aged 51. She died in a nursing home in Champaign, Illinois. The cause of her death was cancer.

She studied at Harvard, concentrating on mathematics, and graduated magna cum laude in 1964. From Harvard she moved on to Caltech receiving an M.Sc. in 1966 and Ph.D. in 1968. She became an associate professor of physics at Illinois in 1974, later becoming a full professor. Her research was in high-energy physics, particularly the force binding nuclear particles to quarks. Her career in research on theoretical high-energy focused on four things: Regge pole theory, phenomenological models of photomeson production, jet calculus in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and use of Grassmann coordinates to describe internal symmetries. She took a sabbatical in 1981–1982 to work at CERN, becoming a fellow of the American Physical Society in the division of particles and fields in 1982. She became director of the university's Education Research Laboratory in the year 1992, remaining at the University of Illinois for her whole career and publishing a total of 64 papers based on her research.

Lorella Margaret Jones (February 22, 1943 – February 9, 1995), was a professor of physics and director of the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Jones was interested in the application of computers to physics education and championed the cause of women in physics. She wrote an essay entitled "Intellectual Contributions of Women in Physics" in Women of Science: Righting the Record.

Lorella Margaret Jones was born on February 22, 1943 in Toronto to an astronomer and industrial physicist. She grew up with her parents, Donald A. Jones and Florence Shirley Patterson Jones of Urbana, and a sister Irene Jones of Livermore, California. Aside from her interest in physics, Jones enjoyed hobbies such as gardening at her garden in Meadowbrook Park, south of Urbana, and kayaking. She grew many vegetables at her garden and gave them out amongst her students and colleagues. She would also spend a summer month on an island in Lake Vermillion every year. Jones was very much a nature enthusiast along with being a physicist.