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Roger D. Woods (1924 – 2005) was an American physicist and educator. He is best known for developing a commonly used nuclear potential, usually referred to as the Woods-Saxon potential.

Woods received his A.B. in Physics from University of Redlands in 1945, and went on to earn his Masters (1949) and PhD (1955) from UCLA under the supervision of Professor David S. Saxon.

Woods’ dissertation work developed a mean field potential of the atomic nucleus that consisted of a diffuse well, rather than the square well model used previously, which became known as the Woods-Saxon potential. As one of the first computational physics researchers, he programmed the nuclear potential model using the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) computer, which UCLA had just acquired, and with a diffuse well with an imaginary potential term was able to reproduce nuclear elastic scattering data better than any previous model. Since then, this proposed model has been one of the most useful methods to describe interactions between a single nucleus and other nuclei. His work is widely used today in nuclear physics –– in atomic structures, atomic reactions, atomic scattering, and particle physics –– as well as in other fields such as astrophysics, materials science, biology and engineering.

Woods became an assistant professor of Physics at the University of Miami in 1954, served as a consultant for Litton Industries from 1958-1959 (after their merge with Monroe Calculating Machine), and then moved back to California as an associate professor at University of Redlands in 1961. His research focused on accurately calculating the electronic structure of rare earth elements. Woods was involved in science communication and outreach, giving public science lectures and teaching hands-on science demos to K-12 school children.

Woods transitioned away from a research career to focus on teaching, and then moved to San Bernardino Valley College, where he stayed until the early 1990s and was a professor emeritus until 2003.