Sallie Watkins
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Sallie Ann Watkins (1922–2011, also known as Sister Mary Howard) was an American physics educator, academic administrator, Catholic nun, and activist.[1]
Watkins was originally from Jacksonville, Florida, where she was born on June 27, 1922.[1]
She joined the Sisters of Notre Dame of Coesfeld, taking the name Sister Mary Howard, and graduated from Notre Dame College near Cleveland, Ohio, in 1945. After five years as a high school chemistry teacher at the Notre Dame Academy (Toledo, Ohio), she returned to Notre Dame College as a physics lecturer. While continuing to hold her position at Notre Dame College, she went to the Catholic University of America for graduate study in physics from 1954 until 1958, receiving a master's degree and completing a Ph.D. with the dissertation Ultrasonic Absorption and Velocity in Liquid Monochloroethane.[1]
In 1966, activized by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, Watkins and several other members of her sisterhood renounced their religious names, left Notre Dame College, and formed a new community in Pueblo, Colorado, calling themselves the Community of Christian Service. Watkins took a faculty position at Southern Colorado State College, which later became the University of Southern Colorado and then Colorado State University Pueblo. There, she moved into academic administration as the chair of the department of physics, dean of the university's College of Science and Mathematics, and its assistant vice president for research.[1] After a term in 1987 as the first senior education fellow of the American Institute of Physics, in Washington, DC,[2] she retired as professor emerita in 1988.[1]
She died on December 21, 2011, in Pueblo, Colorado.[1]
