Jill Bonner
Jill Christine Bonner (August 20, 1937 – July 29, 2021) was a British‑American physicist who studied how tiny magnets behave when arranged in a line. She was a professor of physics at the University of Rhode Island.
Bonner grew up in London, attended Newland High School for Girls, and was an outstanding sprinter. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1968 from King’s College London. Her Ph.D. work was done in Cyril Domb’s lab, with guidance from Michael Fisher.
She taught at Royal Holloway, University of London from 1962 to 1967. In 1967 she married physicist John F. Nagle and moved to the United States to join Carnegie Mellon University. In the early 1970s she listed affiliations with Carnegie Mellon and the University of Utah, and in 1971 she filed a complaint about a research appointment at Carnegie Mellon. She later worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
In 1976 she joined the University of Rhode Island, part of a push to raise the university’s research profile. The hiring and pay for women at URI were later found by a court to have been discriminatory in a broader pattern, and the case led to back pay for hundreds of female faculty members. Bonner was a Radcliffe Fellow in 1979–1980 and was promoted to full professor at URI in 1981. She received an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women in 1982 to visit Michigan State University. She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1977 and won URI’s faculty award for scholarly excellence in 1980. King’s College London awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1984.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 18:52 (CET).