Alex Zunger

Prof. Alex Zunger, IAS Distinguished Scholar 2021/2022, is director and chief scientist for Theory in the Center on Inverse Design (CID), and research professor and a fellow of the Institute of Renewable and Sustainable Energy at the University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, USA. Prof. Zunger graduated from the University of Tel Aviv, Israel, with a B.Sc. (1968), an M.Sc. (1970) and a Ph.D. (in 1975) in Chemical Physics. He received his Ph.D. under the direction of Prof. Joshua Jortner and Prof. Binyamin Englman, with whom he worked on Quantum Theory of Molecular Solids. Prof. Zunger held his postdoctoral research under the guidance of Prof. Art Freeman at the Physics Department of Northwestern University, Evanston, USA (1975-1977), and then under the guidance of Prof. Marvin Cohen at the Physics Department of U.C. Berkeley, Berkeley, USA (1977-1978) where he was nominated IBM fellow. In 1978, he became a research fellow at National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Golden, Colorado, USA (1978-2011). At the NREL, he established and headed until 2011 the Solid State Theory group. In 2009, Prof. Zunger won a 5-year research endeavor of $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and establishes the Center of Inverse Design (CID). Prof. Zunger is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society, and a past Sackler fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel (2011-2012). Awards: the 2018 Boer Medal for photovoltaic research; the 2013 TMS Hume-Rothery Award on Theory of alloys; the 2011 (inaugural) Materials Theory Award of the Materials Research Society on Inverse Design; the 2010 Tomassoni Prize (Italy); the 2010 Medal of the Schola Physica Romana" celebrating the tradition of E. Fermi; the 2001 John Bardeen award of The Material Society on "Spontaneous Ordering in semiconductor alloys"; the 2001 Rahman Award of the American Physical Society on 'foundational development of First Principles methods'; and the 2009 Gutenberg Award (Germany) on correlated electron systems. Prof. Zunger research field is the Condensed Matter Theory of Real Materials and he is a pioneer in the field now called “First Principles Theory of Solids”. He is the author of the fifth-most-cited paper in the 110-year history of Physical Review (out of over 350,000 articles published in that journal). In the course of his research, he has authored more than 700 articles in refereed journals, which includes over 150 articles in Physical Review Letters and Rapid Communications sections of the journal Physical Review B and three citation classics. Declared by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) as the 39th most-cited physicist out of more than 500,000 physicists examined, based on publications in 1981–1997 in all branches of physics. Prof. Zunger serves as a nominator and consultant for the Physics Nobel Committee for the past five years.