Janice Button Shafer

The Shafer family is deeply saddened to announce the death of Janice Button Shafer on October 13, 2026, one month after her 95th birthday. She died peacefully from natural causes in the presence of family in Pasadena, CA. She was an amazing woman and a powerful force who impressed everyone she met. We will miss her energy and hearing all her stories, but she will never be forgotten.

Janice was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on September 13, 1931, with her twin sister Judy Button Harmon, to mother Anita Wolever and father Charles T. Button. Inspired by her engineer father, she studied Engineering Physics at Cornell University at a time when there was one woman student for every 500 men in engineering. After receiving her Bachelor’s degree in 1954, she continued her studies and did research on a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Goettingen and Max Planck Institute in Germany.

Janice did her graduate work at the University of California in Berkeley, where she performed research in experimental nuclear physics with the Chamberlain-Segrè group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). She received her Ph.D. in particle physics in 1959, followed by postdoctoral work studying elementary-particle interactions with the Alvarez group at LBNL. While at LBNL, she met John Shafer, a mathematics graduate student at U.C. Berkeley who would complete his doctoral dissertation on algebraic and exponential semigroups in 1971. They were married in 1962.

In 1966, Janice headed east to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, as associate professor of physics to start a new experimental particle physics group. Her group engaged in a variety of experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, NY over the next two decades. Among her accomplishments, she designed a low-temperature polarized target, as well as many detectors for studies of reactions of elementary particles. She also engaged in experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), including the large Babar international collaboration. Janice has said that her most important experiment was not in physics, but was in the fight to save one of her sons from stage 4 childhood cancer. Her refusal to lose hope, even when oncologists had given up, and her persistent determination and research to find doctors and treatment options is the reason he survived and is still alive today.

Besides physics and engineering, her interests included arms control, women in physics and engineering, and piano chamber music. Her attention to detail and precision made her an accomplished musician. Janice started playing piano at age seven, was a soloist with the Daton Philharmonic Orchestra in Ohio at age 15, and gave many chamber music performances in trio groups in Massachusetts and California. She continued playing and performing chamber music and piano solos into her late 80s.

She was preceded in death by her husband John Shafer in 2010, and her twin sister Judy Button Harmon in 2021. She is survived by her three children, daughter Christina M. S. Cohen (Tom Sanders), and twin sons Charles F. Shafer and John C. Shafer (Sue Xiaohui Shafer), all in California. She is also survived by two grandchildren, Jade R. Cohen (Arne Waumans) and Maia E. Cohen, and great grandchild Marcel J. G. Waumans.

The family is planning a private service. Memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared. For those who wish to celebrate Janice’s life with a donation in her honor, please consider donating to the American Cancer Society.

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