After completing her doctorate, she became a researcher at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and, in 1955, at the Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory, where she continued to work until 1961. In 1958, she became a research faculty member at Brown University,[1] and in 1961 she became a full-time faculty member at Brown. She was promoted to full professor in 1974, and retired in 1995.[2]
At Brown, Widgoff was executive director of the physics department from 1968 until 1980. She served as chair of the American Physical Society (APS) committee on the status of women in physics and of the APS New England Section in the 1970s.[1]
Widgoff's doctoral research involved observations of cosmic rays both at high altitude on Mount Blue Sky in Colorado and deep underground at Cornell University. Her early research at Brown centered on the "tau-theta puzzle", in which two different decay paths were thought to originate with different strange particles that could not be distinguished from each other experimentally. This was eventually resolved through the discovery of parity violation and the realization that both paths had the same starting particle, the kaon. Widgoff's work on this problem combined experiments on the Cosmotron at Brookhaven and the Bevatron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.[1]
