| | 41 | Name: | Dr. James B. Hartle | | | Institution: | University of California, Santa Barbara; Santa Fe Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | Death Date: | May 17, 2023 | | | | | | |
James Hartle was educated at Princeton University (AB,1960), and the California Institute of Technology where he completed a Ph.D.in 1964 with Murray Gell-Mann. He has held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. He is currently Research Professor and Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. His scientific work is concerned with the application of Einstein's relativistic theory of gravity --- general relativity --- to realistic astrophysical situations, especially cosmology. He has contributed usefully to the understanding of gravitational waves, relativistic stars, and black holes. He is currently interested in the quantum origin of the universe and the earliest moments of the big bang where the subjects of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and cosmology overlap. His work with Stephen Hawking on the quantum wave function of the universe is an example. He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a NATO Senior Science Fellow, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a founder and past director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. He received the American Physical Society’s 2009 Einstein Prize for his work in gravitational physics. | |
| 42 | Name: | Dr. Lene Vestergaard Hau | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Lene Vestergaard Hau is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics and is the Area Chair for Applied Physics at Harvard University. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 1999, she was a senior scientist at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and holds a Ph.D. in Physics from University of Aarhus, Denmark. Hau led a team who succeeded in slowing a pulse of light to 15 miles per hour and also brought light to a stop. They took matters further as they stopped and extinguished a light pulse in one part of space, and subsequently revived it in a different location. In the process, the light pulse is converted to a perfect matter copy that can be stored, sculpted, and then turned back to light. These results represent the ultimate quantum control of light and matter. Hau’s team also utilized the great spatial compression of ultra-slow light pulses to generate quantum shock waves in Bose-Einstein condensates thereby opening up a new field for studies of the rich and dramatic nonlinear dynamics of these superfluid, cold atomic systems.
Hau has contributed to a wide variety of research fields. Her Ph.D. work was in theoretical condensed matter physics and she later shifted her attention to experimental and theoretical optical and atomic physics. Her research has included studies of ultra-cold atoms and superfluid Bose-Einstein condensates, as well as channeling of high-energy electrons, protons, and positrons in single crystals with experiments at CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Her group has manipulated atomic matter waves with nanoscale structures, and performed protein studies at the single molecule level with biological nanopores.
She is a 2001 MacArthur Fellow, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society. Hau is also the recipient of numerous awards, including Harvard University’s Ledlie Prize, the Ole Roemer Medal, awarded by the University of Copenhagen, and the Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award awarded by the American Association of Physics Teachers. In 2010, she was named "World Dane," and in 2012 "Thomson Reuters (Clarivate) Citation Laureate in Physics." In 2018 she was honored with the Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture and Medal, sponsored by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences through its Nobel Committee for Physics, and in 2019 with the Lars Onsager Lecture and Medal by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and the Dirac Medal and Lecture by the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and the Australian Institute of Physics.
Lene Hau’s research is described on RadioLab’s "Master of the Universe." | |
| 43 | Name: | Dr. Wick C. Haxton | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley; University of Washington | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Wick Haxton is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently directs a National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center on multi-messenger astrophysics. He is also Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Senior Visiting Scientist, RIKEN. Previously he served for 15 years as the first director of the Institute for Nuclear Theory, University of Washington, the Department of Energy’s national center for the field. In that role he established what is now known as the Bahcall Committee, whose recommendations led to the creation of a US facility for deep underground science in South Dakota.
Born in Santa Cruz, CA, he received his BA degree in Mathematics and Physics from UC Santa Cruz in 1971, and his PhD in Physics from Stanford University in 1976.
After a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Mainz, he became a J. R. Oppenheimer Fellow and then a staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He then spent 25 years at the University of Washington as Professor of Physics and Adjunct Professor of Astronomy, before moving to Berkeley in 2009. He served as chair of Berkeley’s Physics Department from 2017 to 2020. His research contributions focus on low-energy tests of fundamental symmetries and on neutrino astrophysics. His work has impacted multiple subfields of physics, including nuclear and particle physics, astrophysics, atomic physics, and condensed matter. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Washington State Academy of Sciences. He is a former Guggenheim, Senior Humboldt Foundation, and Simons Foundation Fellow, and in 2004 was awarded the American Physical Society’s Hans Bethe Prize. He and his wife, Laura Kathleen, have two grown children and two grandchildren. | |
| 44 | Name: | Dr. Robert Hofstadter | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 1986 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1915 | | | Death Date: | 11/17/90 | | | | |
| 45 | Name: | Dr. Pierre Hohenberg | | | Institution: | New York University | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | Death Date: | December 15, 2017 | | | | | | |
Pierre Hohenberg received his PhD from Harvard University in 1962. After postdoctoral positions in Moscow and Paris he was a staff member at Bell Laboratories until 1995. During the period 1974-1977 he was also a professor of Physics at the Technical University in Munich. From 1995 to 2004 he served as Deputy Provost for Science and Technology at Yale University. In 2004 he moved to NYU as the Senior Vice Provost for Research, until 2010, when he joined the Department of Physics as professor. He became emeritus in 2013. Hohenberg's principal areas of scholarship included condensed matter physics, statistical
physics, non-equilibrium phenomena and the foundations of quantum
mechanics and the philosophy of science. He was particularly well-known as one of the originators of Density Functional Theory and of the Dynamical Scaling Theory of critical phenomena.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the American Physical Society, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the recipient of the Fritz London Prize for Low Temperature Physics, the Max Planck Medaille of the German Physical Society and the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society. In addition, he served on numerous advisory committees to universities, federal agencies, and national and international professional organizations. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. Pierre Hohenberg died December 15, 2017, at the age of 84. | |
| 46 | Name: | Dr. Barbara V. Jacak | | | Institution: | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1957 | | | | | | |
Barbara V. Jacak is a Professor of Physics at University of California, Berkeley. She is an internationally recognized leader in the physics community whose research lies on the boundary between nuclear and particle physics. Jacak earned her Phd in chemical physics from Michigan State University in 1984.
Jacak's research career includes 12 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory's Physics Division, where she was a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow from 1984 to 1987 and a scientific staff member from 1987 to 1996. She then spent 18 years as a Professor of Physics at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, becoming Distinguished Professor of Physics in 2008. From 2007 to 2012, she served as spokesperson for the PHENIX Collaboration at the Brookhaven Relativistic Ion Collider, where she played a crucial role in discovering quark-gluon plasma, a new state of matter in which quarks are no longer confined and display a strongly interacting liquid-like behavior. In addition to being named a Professor of Physics at Berkeley in 2015, she was also appointed director of nuclear science at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. A leader of the CERN NA44 heavy-ion experiment, she discovered the momentum dependence of Bose-Einstein correlations of the collision products, allowing her to infer experimentally the collective expansion velocity of the collision volume.
Jacak is also a superb science administrator. She was a member of the American Physical Society's Division of Nuclear Physics Executive Committee from 1995 to 1997. From 2014 to 2018, she was a member of the National Academy of Science's Board on Physics and Astronomy, chairing it in 2016 and 2017. She received both the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics and the Department of Energy Distinguished Scientist Fellow Award in 2019. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2021. | |
| 47 | Name: | Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson | | | Institution: | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson is the 18th President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y., and Hartford, Conn., the oldest technological research university in the United States. She is slated to lead Rensselaer through June 2022. Dr. Jackson holds a Ph.D. in theoretical elementary particle physics from M.I.T. (1973) and a S.B. in physics from M.I.T. (1968). Her research specialty is in theoretical condensed matter physics, especially layered systems, and the physics of opto-electronic materials.
Describing her as "a national treasure," the National Science Board selected Dr. Jackson as its 2007 recipient of the prestigious Vannevar Bush Award for "a lifetime of achievements in scientific research, education, and senior statesman-like contributions to public policy." Described by Time Magazine (2005) as "perhaps the ultimate role model for women in science," President Jackson has held senior leadership positions in government, industry, research, and the academy.
Since arriving at Rensselaer in 1999, Dr. Jackson has fostered an extraordinary renaissance there through the vision, development and implementation of The Rensselaer Plan, the Institute's strategic blueprint. This institutional transformation has included the hiring of more than 180 new faculty and a corresponding reduction in class size and student/faculty ratios; initiating and/or completing $500 million in new construction and renovation of facilities for research, teaching, and student life; a doubling of research awards; and innovations in curriculum, undergraduate research, and student life initiatives. President Jackson secured a $360 million unrestricted gift to the university (2001), launched the $1 billion Renaissance at Rensselaer Campaign (2004), and expanded the goal of the campaign to $1.4 billion (2006) when the initial goal was met earlier than anticipated.
Prior to her leadership of Rensselaer, President Jackson was Chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; a theoretical physicist conducting basic research at the former AT&T Bell Laboratories; and a professor of theoretical physics at Rutgers University. In 1995 President Clinton appointed Dr. Jackson to serve as Chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). From 1995-99 she was Chair of the NRC, which is charged with the protection of the public health and safety, the environment, and the common defense and security by licensing, regulating, and safeguarding the use of reactor byproduct material in the U.S. From 1991-95, Dr. Jackson was professor of physics at Rutgers University, where she taught undergraduate and graduate students, conducted research on the electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional systems, and supervised Ph.D. candidates. She concurrently served as a consultant in semiconductor theory to AT&T Bell Laboratories. From 1976-91, Dr. Jackson conducted research in theoretical physics, solid state and quantum physics, and optical physics at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Her primary research foci were the optical and electronic properties of layered materials including transition metal dichalcogenides, electrons on the surface of liquid helium films, and strained-layer semiconductor superlattices. She is best known for her work on polaronic aspects of electrons in two-dimensional systems.
Dr. Jackson is past President (2004) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and former Chairman (2005) of the AAAS Board of Directors. In 2019 she was appointed to the global Board of Directors of the Nature Conservancy. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2001) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1991), the American Physical Society (1986) the AAAS (2007), and the Royal Academy of Engineering (2012). She is a member of a number of other professional organizations and holds 44 honorary doctoral degrees. Dr. Jackson is the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate from M.I.T. and was one of the first two African-American women to receive a doctorate in physics in the United States. She is the first African-American to become a Commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the first woman and the first African-American to serve as the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the first African-American woman to lead a national research university. She also is the first African-American woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and the first to receive the Vannevar Bush award. In 2002, Dr. Jackson was named one of the Top 50 Women in Science by Discover magazine, and recognized in a published book by ESSENCE titled 50 of The Most Inspiring African-Americans. She also was named one of "50 R&D Stars to Watch" by Industry Week Magazine. Dr. Jackson was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1998 for her significant and profound contributions as a distinguished scientist and advocate for education, science, and public policy. She was inducted into the Women in Technology International Foundation Hall of Fame (WITI) in 2000. In 2015 she was awarded the National Medal of Science and in 2020 she was awarded the Joseph A. Burton Forum Award of the American Physical Society. Dr. Jackson is married to Dr. Morris A. Washington, also a physicist. They have one son, Alan, a graduate of Dartmouth College. | |
| 48 | Name: | Dr. Leo P. Kadanoff | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | Death Date: | October 26, 2015 | | | | | | |
Leo Kadanoff received a Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1960. He was a resident Fellow at the Bohr Institute of Theoretical Studies in Copenhagen from 1960-62. He was a professor of physics at the University of Illinois for seven years, then moved to Brown University as University Professor of Physics and professor of engineering. In 1978 he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago where he served as director of the University of Chicago Materials Research Laboratory for six years. He was the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Physics and Mathematics.
Leo Kadanoff was the major figure in developing the scaling theory of thermodynamic phase transitions, following from M. E. Fisher's analysis of experimental data and foreshadowing K. G. Wilson's explicit mathematical expression of the scaling idea.
Dr. Kadanoff in his early work was also one of the originators of the application of quantum field theory to many-body theory, and he had been the national leader in the study of complex non-linear systems, specializing in turbulence and in simulation studies of complex dynamic systems. He was among the world's most widely respected condensed matter physicists.
He is the author of Electricity Magnetism and Heat, 1967, and co-author of Quantum Statistical Mechanics, 1963. Among his many honors, he has received the Buckley Prize and Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society, the Boltzmann Medal from the International Union of Pure & Applied Physics, the Wolf Foundation Award, the Grande Madaille d'Or from the Académie des Sciences de l'Institut de France, and in 2000 he received the National Medal of Science. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1997. Leo Kadanoff died October 26, 2015, at age 78, in Chicago, Illinois. | |
| 49 | Name: | Dr. Daniel Kleppner | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | | | | |
Daniel Kleppner received bachelors degrees in physics from Williams College and Cambridge University, and in 1959 received the Ph.D. from Harvard University where he worked under the direction of Professor Norman F. Ramsey. The following year Drs. Ramsey and Kleppner developed the hydrogen maser, an atomic clock that has been widely employed for scientific studies and technological applications including the global positioning system. In 1966 Dr. Kleppner joined the faculty of physics at MIT and started a research program in high precision measurements and atomic scattering. David E. Pritchard, then a graduate student at Harvard, came with Kleppner to M.I.T. and later joined the faculty and commenced a research career that over the years contributed significantly to MIT's reputation. as an international leader in atomic physics. In the mid 1970s, Dr. Kleppner developed methods for studying a class of atoms known as Rydberg atoms. His early studies on the inhibited spontaneous emission of Rydberg atoms helped to spawn the field of cavity quantum electrodynamics, a subject that has helped to focus new interest on basic measurement processes. He also pioneered the study of Rydberg atoms in strong electric and magnetic fields. This system turned out to provide a fruitful arena for studying the connections between quantum and classical behavior, including the phenomenon known as quantum chaos. In 1977 Dr. Kleppner joined in a collaboration with Professor Thomas J. Greytak to attempt to form a Bose-Einstein condensate of atomic hydrogen. The search took longer than they expected--over twenty years--but in 1998 they succeeded. A few years earlier, students of Dr. Kleppner and Dr. Pritchard had discovered Bose-Einstein condensation in gasses of alkali metal atoms and the field exploded into the most dramatic development in atomic physics since the invention of the laser. Dr. Kleppner is currently the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics, Emeritus, and Co-Director at the MITA-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Sciences, Paris, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served as Chairperson of the Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society, a member of the APS Council, and on numerous advisory committees. Dr. Kleppner has received the Davisson-Germer Prize and the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the William F. Meggers Award and Frederick Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America, the James Rhyn Killian Faculty Achievement Award of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Wolf Foundtion Prize in Physics, and the 2006 National Medal of Science. He served as co-chair of the American Physical Society Study Group on Boost-Phase Intercept for the National Missile Defense and, with the other members of the Study Group, has been awarded the 2005 APS Leo Szilard Lectureship Award in recognition of this work. In 2014 he was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics from the Franklin Institute. He received the 2017 American Physical Society Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research. | |
| 50 | Name: | Dr. Walter Kohn | | | Institution: | University of California, Santa Barbara | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1923 | | | Death Date: | April 20, 2016 | | | | | | |
Walter Kohn was Professor of Physics Emeritus and Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara at the time of his death on April 20, 2016 at the age of 93. A condensed matter theorist, Dr. Kohn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998 for his development of the density-functional theory. He made seminal contributions to the understanding of the electronic structure of materials and played a leading role in the development of the density functional theory, which has revolutionized scientists' approach to the electronic structure of atoms, molecules and solid materials in physics, chemistry and materials science. With the advent of supercomputers, density functional theory has become an essential tool for electronic materials science. Dr. Kohn also made major contributions to the physics of semiconductors, superconductivity, surface physics and catalysis. As the founding director of the National Science Foundation's Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he helped transform the Institute into one of the leading research centers in physics. Prior to joining UCSB in 1979, Dr. Kohn taught at Harvard University (1948-50), the Carnegie Institute of Technology (1950-53), and the University of California, San Diego (1953-79). He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1948. Dr. Kohn was the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1963), the Oliver Buckley Prize (1960), the National Medal of Science (1988) and membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. | |
| 51 | Name: | Dr. Polykarp Kusch | | | Institution: | University of Texas | | | Year Elected: | 1967 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1911 | | | Death Date: | 3/20/93 | | | | |
| 52 | Name: | Dr. Edwin Land | | | Institution: | Roland Institute of Science | | | Year Elected: | 1957 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1909 | | | Death Date: | 3/1/91 | | | | |
| 53 | Name: | Dr. Leon M. Lederman | | | Institution: | Fermi National Accelerator Lab & Illinois Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1989 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1922 | | | Death Date: | October 3, 2018 | | | | | | |
Leon Lederman was an internationally renowned specialist in high energy physics and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was involved in the discovery that there is more than one type of neutrino and led the team that found the 'bottom quark'. He retired in 1989 after ten years as the Director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. That year he became the Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago, while continuing to promote science education.
After receiving his B.A. from New York City College, Columbia University awarded him an M.A. in 1948 and a Ph.D. in 1951. Dr. Lederman was associated with Columbia as both student and faculty member for more than thirty years. From 1962 to 1989 he was Director of Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, which is the Columbia Physics Department's center for experimental research in high energy physics. In addition to his own research career and administrative activities, Dr. Lederman has long recognized the importance of science education in the intellectual and economic health of society. In 1998, he became Resident Scholar at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a three-year residential public school for gifted Illinois high school students, which he helped found in 1986.
Dr. Lederman published well over 300 papers and is the author of two popular science books: From Quarks to the Cosmos (with David Schramm) and The God Particle with Dick Teresi. He edited Portraits of Great American Scientists, written with fifteen high school students. The recipient of numerous honors and prizes, he shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Jack Steinberger and Mel Schwartz for their work on neutrinos. He was also the recipient of the Enrico Fermi Prize, the 1973 National Medal of Science, and the 1982 Wolf Prize. He was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1989. Leon Lederman died October 3, 2018 in Rexburg, Idaho at the age of 96. | |
| 54 | Name: | Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 1972 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | 08/04/2024 | | | | | | |
Physicist Tsung-Dao Lee has devoted his long career to the study of the theoretical aspects of particle and nuclear physics. In 1957, Dr. Lee and Chen Ning Yang won the Nobel Prize in Physics for disproving a tenet of physics known as the conservation of parity. Their finding was based on research carried out at the Brookhaven Institute's particle accelerator, the Cosmotron, while they were visiting scientists at the Laboratory in 1956. Born in Shanghai, China, Dr. Lee attended universities in that country before coming to the U.S. in 1946, where he became a student of Enrico Fermi and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1950. After working as a research associate at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Lee joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1951. Then, in 1953, he joined Columbia University, where he is currently University Professor. After serving a six-year term as Director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center, Dr. Lee stepped down and was named Director Emeritus. In addition, Dr. Lee is Director of the China Center of Advanced Science & Technology in Beijing; the Beijing Institute of Modern Physics; and the Zhejiang Institute of Modern Physics, all in China. He holds twelve honorary degrees and 15 honorary professorships and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and several other academies. | |
| 55 | Name: | Dr. Anthony J. Leggett | | | Institution: | University of Illinois | | | Year Elected: | 1991 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
Anthony J. Leggett is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics. He has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois since 1983 and in 2020 donated his papers to the University of Illinois Archives. He is widely recognized as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics, and his pioneering work on superfluidity was recognized by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences (foreign member) and is a Fellow of the Royal Society (U.K.), the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (U.K.) and was knighted (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 "for services to physics." Professor Leggett has shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and other strongly coupled superfluids. He set directions for research in the quantum physics of macroscopic dissipative systems and use of condensed systems to test the foundations of quantum mechanics. His research interests lie mainly within the fields of theoretical condensed matter physics and the foundations of quantum mechanics. He has been particularly interested in the possibility of using special condensed-matter systems, such as Josephson devices, to test the validity of the extrapolation of the quantum formalism to the macroscopic level; this interest has led to a considerable amount of technical work on the application of quantum mechanics to collective variables and in particular on ways of incorporating dissipation into the calculations. He is also interested in the theory of superfluid liquid 3He, especially under extreme nonequilibrium conditions, in high-temperature superconductivity, and in the newly realized system of Bose-condensed atomic gases. | |
| 56 | Name: | Dr. Robert E. Marshak | | | Institution: | Virginia Poly Tech & State University | | | Year Elected: | 1983 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1916 | | | Death Date: | 12/23/92 | | | | |
| 57 | Name: | Dr. Edwin M. McMillan | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1952 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | 9/7/91 | | | | |
| 58 | Name: | Dr. N. David Mermin | | | Institution: | Cornell University | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1935 | | | | | | |
N. David Mermin received an A.B. degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1956. He stayed at Harvard, changing to physics, where he received a Ph.D. in 1961. He spent two postdoctoral years in Rudolf Peierls’ Department of Mathematical Physics in Birmingham England, followed by a year with Walter Kohn at the University of California, San Diego, before he joined Physics Department at Cornell University in 1964. Mermin was Director of Cornell’s Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics from 1984 to 1990, and retired from Cornell as the Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus, in 2006.
He is known for the Mermin-Wagner theorem in statistical mechanics, the Mermin-Ho relation in low-temperature physics, and the Lindhard-Mermin dielectric function in metals physics. He extended the fundamental theorem of density-functional theory to thermal equilibrium (chemistry), reformulated space-groups to include aperiodic crystals (crystallography), and applied topology to the theory of defects (condensed matter physics). He has written extensively about foundational issues in quantum mechanics.
His 1976 book Solid State Physics (with Neil W. Ashcroft) has been translated into six languages and remains the major text in the field, though still in its original edition. His Quantum Computer Science (2007) offers a unique perspective on this new, growing field. In addition to these two technical books he has written four books for a general audience. Space and Time in Special Relativity (1968) and It’s About Time (2005) give unusual and quite different expositions of special relativity, using no mathematical tools beyond plane geometry and some very elementary algebra. Boojums All the Way Through (1990) and Why Quark Rhymes with Pork (2016) are collections of his popular essays and lectures.
Mermin is well-known for his thirty "Reference Frame" columns commenting on physics and the practice of physics, that appeared in Physics Today between 1988 and 2009. All can be found in his quark-pork volume. His efforts to reconcile the two sides in the "science wars" of the 1990s met with more indignation than approval, from both factions. He has held dozens of named visiting lectureships throughout the United States and Europe.
He was a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1985 to 1989; a member of the Executive Committee of the Cornell Materials Science Center, in the 1980s; a member of the advisory board of arXiv.org in the late 90s and early 00s, and at various times a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of Physics, Physics in Perspective, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.
Mermin was a 1970 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a 1988 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a 1991 member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1989 he received the first Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, in 1994, the Klopsteg Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers, in 1997 Cornell’s Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2010 the Majorana "Best Person in Physics" Prize.
In retirement he continues to write and lecture on quantum foundations, works very hard at the piano (struggling to master, for example, the Chopin G Minor Ballade),
and collaborates with his wife Dorothy, the Goldwin Smith Professor of English Emerita, on maintaining their house and the surrounding eight acres of gardens, meadows, and woodlands in the town of Dryden, New York, just outside of Ithaca.
"N." stands for "Nathaniel", which the USA Patriot Act is slowly requiring the world to call him. | |
| 59 | Name: | Dr. Margaret Murnane | | | Institution: | University of Colorado at Boulder | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Margaret Murnane is a Fellow of JILA and a Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of Colorado. She runs a joint, multi-disciplinary, research group with her husband, Prof. Henry Kapteyn. She received her B.S and M.S. degrees from University College Cork, Ireland, and her Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley. Prof. Murnane with her students and collaborators uses coherent beams of laser and x-ray light to capture the fastest dynamics in molecules and materials at the nanoscale. Margaret is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, and the AAAS. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, and chaired the President’s Committee for the National Medal of Science for three years. She was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. She shared the 2009 Ahmed Zewail Award of the American Chemical Society, the 2010 Schawlow Prize of the American Physical Society, and the 2010 R.W. Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America with her husband Henry Kapteyn. She received the 2021 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics from the Franklin Institute. Margaret is very interested in increasing diversity in science and engineering. | |
| 60 | Name: | Dr. Alfred O. C. Nier | | | Institution: | University of Minnesota | | | Year Elected: | 1953 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1911 | | | Death Date: | 5/16/94 | | | | |
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