James William Corbett (25 August 1928, Manhattan – 25 April 1994, Albany, New York) was a solid-state physicist.
He was the author or co-author of hundreds of publications, including 10 books and monographs, the most recent of which, "Hydrogen in Crystalline Semiconductors," was published by Springer Verlag in 1992.
As his career progressed, Corbett expanded his research efforts to include defects resulting from neutron irradiation, ion-implant damage and various aspects of semiconductor processing.
With his students and collaborators he also made innovative use of probes such as deep-level transient spectroscopy, positron annihilation and quantum mechanical cluster calculations to push forward research into the basic nature of defects.
[2] In 1999 a bequest of $1.5 million from M. E. Grenander funded the James W. Corbett Distinguished Professorship in Physics at the University at Albany, SUNY.