Nigel D. Goldenfeld

Nigel D. Goldenfeld
Nigel D. Goldenfeld
Nigel Goldenfeld
Nigel Goldenfeld
  • Swanlund Endowed Chair Emeritus of Physics and Research Professor
(217) 333-8027
3113 Engineering Sciences Building

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Education

  • Ph.D. Physics University of Cambridge, England 1982

Biography

Nigel Goldenfeld holds a Center for Advanced Study Professorship and 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 Condensed Matter Theory group in the Department of Physics, and leads the Biocomplexity Theme at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. He directs the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology, at UIUC. Nigel received his Ph.D. 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 at 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. Nigel'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. Nigel's 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, Nigel 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, Nigel took an entrepreneurial leave-of-absence to found NumeriX, the award-winning company that specializes in high-performance software for the derivatives marketplace. Amongst his awards, Nigel has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, a University Scholar of the University of Illinois, a recipient of the Xerox Award for Research, and a recipient of the A. Nordsieck Award for Excellence in Graduate 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. Nigel is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Selected Articles in Journals

Honors

  • University Scholar (1994-1997)

Teaching Honors

  • Nordsieck Award for Excellence in Teaching (May 2002)

Research Honors

  • Elected Fellow, Institute of Physics (May 2011)
  • Elected Member, National Academy of Sciences (May 2010)
  • Elected Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (May 2010)
  • Swanlund Endowed Professor, UIUC. Aug 2008 - present
  • Fellow of the American Physical Society (1995)
  • Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1987-1991)
  • Junior Xerox Award for Faculty Research (1991)
  • Beckman Fellow, Center for Advanced Study-University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Fall, 1988)

Recent Courses Taught

  • PHYS 504 - Statistical Physics
  • PHYS 569 - Emergent States of Matter