4/27/2010 Celia Elliott
Swanlund Professor of Physics Nigel D. Goldenfeld has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Written by Celia Elliott
Nigel D. Goldenfeld has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, as announced April 27 in Washington DC at the Academy's annual meeting. He is one of 72 new members and 18 foreign associates elected this year.
Goldenfeld holds a Swanlund Endowed Chair at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with appointments in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Genomic Biology. He is a member of the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory and the Center for the Physics of Living Cells and leads the Biocomplexity Theme at the Institute for Genomic Biology.
Goldenfeld received his doctorate in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1982, and for the years 1982-1985 was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 1985, he has been on the faculty at the University of Illinois, with sabbatical positions at Stanford University and the University of Cambridge.
Goldenfeld's research explores how patterns evolve in time; examples include the growth of snowflakes, the microstructures of materials, the flow of fluids, the dynamics of geological formations, and even the spatial structure of ecosystems. His interests in emergent and collective phenomena extend from condensed matter physics, where he has contributed to the modern understanding of high-temperature superconductors, to biology, where his current work focuses on evolution and microbial ecology.
Strongly committed to teaching, Goldenfeld is well-known in the physics community for authoring one of the standard graduate textbooks in statistical mechanics and is widely regarded as one of the most popular graduate-level lecturers in the Department of Physics.
In 1996, Goldenfeld took an entrepreneurial leave-of-absence to found NumeriX, the award-winning company that specializes in high-performance numerical software for derivative risk management in the financial markets.
Goldenfeld has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, a University Scholar of the University of Illinois, a recipient of the Xerox Award for Faculty Research, and a recipient of the A. Nordsieck Award for Excellence in Physics Teaching. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance and Communications in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Goldenfeld was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on April 19.
The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the futherance of science and its use for the general welfare. It was extablished in 1863 by the United States Congress to advise the federal government, upon request, on matters of science and technology.