At the College of Engineering's annual faculty awards ceremony on May 2, Associate Professor of Physics Karin Dahmen was presented with a 2011 Xerox Senior Faculty Research Award. The annual award, which is funded by Xerox Corporation, recognizes outstanding research achievements by the College's associate professors.
Dahmen was cited for her work in computational materials physics. Her application of methods from statistical physics have yielded important breakthroughs in modeling dislocation avalanches that are important for the engineering sciences. She has made considerable progress in unraveling collective behavior in systems ranging from advancing domain boundaries in magnets to event-size distributions in earthquakes.
Her wide-ranging interests in "soft" condensed matter physics include nonequilibrium dynamical systems, hysteresis, avalanches, earthquakes, population biology, and disorder-induced critical behavior. Most recently, she has applied her computational and statistical methods to analyze and interpret data from single-molecule fluorescence energy transfer experiments in biological physics.
Dahmen received her Vordiplom in physics from the Universität Bonn, Germany, in 1989, and her Ph.D in physics from Cornell in 1995. Before joining the faculty at Illinois in 1999, she was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University. She was a Beckman Fellow in the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois in 2001/02. She is a member of the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory and the Center for the Physics of Living Cells at Illinois.