She earned a Ph.D. in 1952 studying cosmic rays at Cornell University with Giuseppe Cocconi and Kenneth Greisen; her dissertation was Neutrons from Interactions of Mu Mesons in Various Targets.

[1] Widgoff's doctoral research involved observations of cosmic rays both at high altitude on Mount Blue Sky in Colorado and deep underground at Cornell University.

Her early research at Brown centered on the "tau-theta puzzle", in which two different decay paths were thought to originate with different strange particles that could not be distinguished from each other experimentally.

Widgoff's work on this problem combined experiments on the Cosmotron at Brookhaven and the Bevatron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Her final experimental work involved the detection of cosmic neutrinos at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Europe.