Wick C. Haxton (born August 21, 1949 in Santa Cruz, California) is an American theoretical nuclear physicist and astrophysicist. Haxton grew up in Santa Cruz, studied from 1967 at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA in Physics and Mathematics 1971) and received his doctorate in 1976 at Stanford University (Semileptonic weak interactions). From 1975 to 1977 he worked at the Institute for Nuclear Physics of the University of Mainz and then until 1984 as Oppenheimer Fellow in the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. After a year as assistant professor at Purdue University in 1984 he became associate professor and in 1987 professor at the University of Washington. He remained there as professor of physics and astronomy until 2009, serving from 1991 to 2006 as di