Barbara Lu Whitten (also published as Barbara Lu Whitten Wolfe) is a retired American physics educator and professor emerita of physics at Colorado College.^[1] She is known for encouraging women in physics, for studying the factors that lead to the success of women in physics, and for promoting inclusive teaching strategies in physics; she has also worked in computational environmental physics.^[2]

Whitten "fell madly in love" with physics at age 16,^[3] and graduated from Carleton College in 1968.^[1] She received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Rochester in 1977,^[3] with the dissertation On Mechanical Quantum Measuring Processes, supervised by Gérard G. Emch.^[4] Her doctoral research applied algebraic statistical mechanics to computational atomic physics,^[3][1] a combination of topics she continued to study for many years.^[3]

After teaching at Miami University and working as a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,^[2] she joined the Physics Department at Colorado College as the first woman in its faculty. She retired in 2017.^[1]

Whitten is the 2018 recipient of the Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers.^[2]