  A review of recent applications of the nonlocal dispersive optical model
(DOM) is presented that allows a simultaneous description of nuclear structure
and nuclear reactions. An assessment of the quality of the resulting potentials
for $^{40}$Ca and $^{48}$Ca is discussed for the description of the $(e,e'p)$
reaction to valence hole states and the possibility of interpreting the data in
terms of absolute spectroscopic factors. The relevance of these results in the
context of conflicting interpretations between transfer and knockout reactions
is pointed out as well as the importance of proton reaction cross sections for
isotopes with neutron excess. Application of the nonlocal DOM to $^{48}$Ca
incorporates the effect of the 8 additional neutrons and allows for an
excellent description of elastic scattering data of both protons and neutrons.
The corresponding neutron distribution constrained by all available data
generates a prediction for the neutron skin that is larger than most mean-field
and available \textit{ab initio} results. Results are presented for the most
recent nonlocal DOM analysis of $^{208}$Pb.
