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Recipient: 2001 John Bardeen Award



The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society's John Bardeen Award, established in 1994, recognizes an individual who has made outstanding contributions and is a leader in the field of electronic materials.
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Alex Zunger

Citation: "For his seminal contributions to the theoretical understanding and prediction of “spontaneous ordering,” phase-stability, and electronic properties of semiconductor alloys; for the impact that this work has had on experimental studies of electronic materials, and for his continued leadership in the field."

Biography: Alex Zunger is an Institute Research Fellow and leader of the Solid State Theory at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). He received his B.Sc, M.Sc, and Ph.D education at the Tel Aviv University in Israel and did his post-doctoral training at Northwestern University (1975-1977) and (as IBM Fellow) University of California, Berkeley (1977-1978). He joined the newly founded NREL in 1978 where he established the Solid State Theory group and has since trained and collaborated with 35 post-doctoral fellows.

Dr. Zunger is an author of 400 journal publications, including over 85 in Physical Review Letters and Rapid Communication. According to recent research done by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), he is the 39th most cited physicist out of more than 500,000 physicists examined, based on publications in 1981-1997 in all branches of physics (his work was cited 8,000 times). His work centers on development and application of first-principles electronic structure theory of real materials. It includes the development of first-principles Pseudopotentials; accurate exchange-correlation functionals; the momentum-space total energy formalism; simultaneous relaxation of atomic positions and electronic wave functions; order N electronic structure approaches; and cluster expansions for alloy thermodynamics. He applied these techniques to metal alloys, quantum semiconductor nanostructures, points defects, and surfaces.


Quote: “I am honored and would like to thank my National Renewable Energy Laboratory post-docs and staff for exciting collaborations on this project: J. Bernard, A. Franceschetti, S.Froyen, D. Laks, K. Mader, R. Magri, J.L. Martins, T. Matilla, A. Mbaye, R. Osorio, V. Ozolins, G.P. Srivastava, D.M. Wood, S.H. Wei, and S.B. Zhang.”

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