text: In 1924, the University of Bristol Council had set aside a portion of a bequest from Henry Herbert Wills for the Department of Physics where Arthur Mannering Tyndall was building up a staff for teaching and research in the H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory, Royal Fort House Gardens. From August 1925, John Lennard-Jones, of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, was elected reader in mathematical physics. In March 1927, LennardJones was appointed Professor of Theoretical physics, a chair being created for him, with Dent becoming his research assistant in theoretical physics. LennardJones pioneered the theory of interatomic and intermolecular forces at Bristol and Dent became one of his first collaborators.
  LennardJones and Dent published six papers together from 1926 to 1928, dealing with the forces between atoms and ions, with the objective of calculating theoretically the properties of carbonate and nitrate crystals. Dents thesis for her masters degree,  (1927), was the basis of the three papers that followed in 1927; with LennardJones, "", and with LennardJones and Sydney Chapman, "" and "". On 28June 1927, she was awarded a MSc degree for her thesis and research work. In 1927, the physics laboratory at Bristol had a surplus of funds, and so it was decided that the funds would be used to provide more technical help. Consequently, Dent was asked to combine her research duties with the post of parttime departmental librarian, the first appointment of librarian in the Department of Physics.
  In 1928, LennardJones and Dent published two papers, "", and with Sydney Chapman, "", that studied the force fields on a thin crystal cleavage. Around this time, quantum mechanics was developed to become the standard formulation for atomic physics. LennardJones left Bristol in 1929 to study the subject for a year as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Göttingen. She wrote one last paper before leaving the physics department at Bristol: "" (1929) examined the effect of the polarisation of surface ions in decreasing the surface energy of alkali halides. In November 1929, she was appointed to the position of technical librarian for the scientific and technical staff in the research department at Metropolitan-Vickers, Trafford Park, Manchester.
  In December 1929, Dent resigned her position at Bristol and it was accepted with regret by the university council. Marjorie Josephine Littleton, the daughter of a local Bristol councillor and a graduate of Girton College, University of Cambridge, was appointed as her replacement on the 1February 1930. Littleton was later Sir Neville Mott's coauthor and research assistant in the physics department. In 1930, LennardJones returned to Bristol, as Dean of the Faculty of Science, and introduced the new quantum theories to the Bristol group.