Ceperley and Greene named CAS Professors

The University of Illinois has announced the appointments of David M. Ceperley and Laura H. Greene as Center for Advanced Study Professors, pending approval of the Board of Trustees.  CAS Professors are permanent members of the Center, selected from the faculty on the basis of their outstanding scholarship. These appointments are among the highest forms of campus recognition. With the Associates and Fellows, who are appointed annually in a campus-wide competition, they form the core of the Center for Advanced Study community.

Ceperley, a condensed matter theorist, has made seminal contributions to quantum Monte Carlo methods and to our physical or formal understanding of quantum many-body systems. His most important contribution is his calculation of the energy of the electron gas, providing basic input for most numerical calculations of electronic structure. He was one of the pioneers in the development and application of path integral Monte Carlo methods for quantum systems at finite temperature, such as superfluid helium and hydrogen under extreme conditions. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Greene, a condensed matter experimentalist, focuses on highly correlated electron systems and novel materials, in particular high-temperature superconductors and the interfaces between metallic superconductors and compound-semiconductor heterostructures. She has made ground-breaking investigations of the role of broken symmetries and their physical ramifications in condensed matter systems, especially that of spontaneously broken-time reversal symmetry in unconventional superconductors. Greene is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.