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= Lilian C. McDermott = Lilian McDermott is a Professor of Physics and Director of the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington.

= Life = McDermott started her education at Vassar College and after finished her undergraduated studies, she pursued for her Ph.D. in experimental nuclear physics at Columbia University and obtaining her degree in 1959.

After teaching at City College of New York, Seattle University, and the University of Washington, she collaborated with professor Arnold Arons to establish a program in the Department of Physics at the University of Washington for the preparation of elementary school teachers during 1969 and 1970. She worked as a volunteer instructor with other few graduates and teaching assistants in a new way to teach physics, based on listening carefully the answers of their students, trying to understand the way they were thinking and asking some questions to achieve a correct understanding of the physics concepts. These activities were the beginning of the Physics Education Research (PER).

Some years later, in 1973, she started a new program in which graduated students were allowed to obtain their doctorates on learning and teaching of physics. Since that time, she is also the Director of the Physics Education Group (PEG) at the university of Washington. With her guidance the group has been well recognized and served as a model for similar physics education research Ph.D. programs at several other universities in the USA.

McDermott is a fellow member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. In 1990 she obtained the Millikan Lecture Award by the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). Then, in 2000, she received the Education Research Award and in 2001 she won the Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the most important award of AAPT. Later in 2002, she was awarded by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics with the Medal of the International Comission of Physics Education. In 2008 the Physics Education Group was selected by the American Physical Society as the recipient of the Excellence in Education Award. More recently, in 2013, McDermott received the Melba Newell Phillips Medal by the AAPT.