Nobel Laureate Walter Kohn to visit IPAM May 29-31

Posted on 5/17/12 in News

wkohnWalter Kohn, Nobel Laureate and professor of physics at University of California Santa Barbara, will be the inaugural speaker in the Green Family Lecture Series, made possible by a generous endowment by former IPAM director and co-founder Mark Green and his family. Kohn has made major contributions to the physics of semiconductors, superconductivity, surface physics and catalysis. He was the founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and has received numerous awards including the Niels Bohr/Unesco Gold Medal, the United States National Medal of Science and the Richard Prange Prize. His role in creating Density Functional Theory, the most widely used theory of the electronic structure of matter, earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. Kohn currently works on Macular Degeneration, renewable energies and global warming. Dr. Kohn will give three lectures, which are open to the public.