11/10/2014 Siv Schwink
University of Illinois Swanlund Professor of Physics and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics Laura Greene has been appointed to serve as vice chair of the C10 Commision of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). The C10 Commission is tasked with promoting the exchange of information and views among members of the international condensed matter physics community and with promoting collaborations between condensed matter physicists and scientists in complementary fields. The commission actively supports international conferences, generates written materials promoting the field, and awards scientific prizes that recognize excellence in the field.
Written by Siv Schwink
Greene is an experimental condensed matter physicist whose current research in strongly correlated electron systems is probing the mechanisms of unconventional superconductivity by planar tunneling and point contact electron spectroscopies. She is also focused on developing methods for predictive design of new families of superconducting materials through spectroscopic studies of the electronic structure of heavy fermions, unconventional superconductors, and other novel materials that show strong electronic correlations, and through studies of superconducting proximity effects on novel normal-state and superconducting materials. Her work has long-term implications for applications in energy storage, production, and transmission.
Greene has a long history of service to scientific organizations. Prior to this appointment, she was active as a member of the C10 Commission through its US Liaison Committee. Greene has been a visiting scientist in Orsay, UCI, and Cambridge, and has co-chaired and advised numerous international conferences. Her various editorial positions include Reports on the Progress in Physics (editor-in-chief), Philosophical Transactions A, and Current Opinions in Solid State & Materials Science (COSSMS).
Greene was elected to the presidential line of the American Physical Society (APS), with her first term beginning January 2015. Prior to being elected, Greene served the APS on its Council, Executive Board, Committee on Committees. She is a founding member of the Committee on Informing the Public (CIP), and co-founder of the new APS Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public (FOEP), nominating, fellowship, multiple prize committees. She is presently the Chair of the Division of Materials Physics (DMP) and served as co-chair of the 2014 March Meeting.
Greene served on the Sloan Fellowship Selection Committee and on the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council in Canada, she was recently elected to the AAAS Board of Directors, and she chairs the Board of Governors for the International Institute for Complex and Adaptive Matter (I2CAM). She has served on the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA), and on the US Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC). Greene also works with COACh to increase the number and career success of women scientists in developing nations, has served on the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics’s C5 commission (low temperature physics) and is presently on its C10 commission (structure and dynamics of condensed matter), while serving on their US Liaison Committee. She is an active member of the Global Science Education and Engagement group, now working to start a journal on the science of public engagement.
Greene is a member of the National Academy of Science and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Institute of Physics (in the United Kingdom), and of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi.
She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2009-10), a Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award of the American Physical Society (1994) and the US Department of Energy’s E. O. Lawrence Award for Materials Research (1999). She was selected a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow (2009-2010) and was twice selected a U. of I. Center for Advanced Study Research Associate, (2006-2007; 2000-2001).
Greene received her bachelor’s degree in physics from The Ohio State University in 1974. She worked as technical staff at Hughes Aircraft for a year following graduation, before returning to academia. She received a master’s degree in physics from The Ohio State University in 1978, a master’s degree in experimental physics from Cornell University in 1980, and her doctoral degree in physics from Cornell University in 1984. Greene worked at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore for a combined total of nine years before joining the faculty at Physics Illinois. Greene is currently an associate director for the Center for Emergent Superconductivity, an Energy Frontier Research Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.