Carl Richard Woese was an American microbiologist and biophysicist. Woese is famous for defining the Archaea in 1977 through a pioneering phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique that has revolutionized microbiology. He also originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name. Woese held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.
Sir Michael Victor Berry, is a British mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, England.
In physics, critical phenomena is the collective name associated with the physics of critical points. Most of them stem from the divergence of the correlation length, but also the dynamics slows down. Critical phenomena include scaling relations among different quantities, power-law divergences of some quantities described by critical exponents, universality, fractal behaviour, and ergodicity breaking. Critical phenomena take place in second order phase transitions, although not exclusively.
Kenneth Geddes "Ken" Wilson was an American theoretical physicist and a pioneer in using computers for studying particle physics. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on phase transitions—illuminating the subtle essence of phenomena like melting ice and emerging magnetism. It was embodied in his fundamental work on the renormalization group.
Sir Samuel Frederick Edwards was a Welsh physicist. The Sam Edwards Medal and Prize is named in his honour.
Artur Konrad Ekert is a British-Polish professor of quantum physics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, professorial fellow in quantum physics and cryptography at Merton College, Oxford, Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore and the founding director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT). His research interests extend over most aspects of information processing in quantum-mechanical systems, with a focus on quantum communication and quantum computation. He is best known as one of the pioneers of quantum cryptography.
Leo Philip Kadanoff was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a former president of the American Physical Society (APS). He contributed to the fields of statistical physics, chaos theory, and theoretical condensed matter physics.
Michael Ellis Fisher was an English physicist, as well as chemist and mathematician, known for his many seminal contributions to statistical physics, including but not restricted to the theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena. He was the Horace White Professor of Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics at Cornell University. Later he moved to the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, where he was University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.
Sir Michael Pepper is a British physicist notable for his work in semiconductor nanostructures.
Sir David Charles Clary, FRS is a British theoretical chemist. He was president of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 2005 to 2020. He was the first chief scientific adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 2009 to 2013. He is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford.
John Cromwell Mather is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) with George Smoot.
Dame Athene Margaret Donald is a British physicist. She is Professor Emerita of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Michael Lawrence KleinNAS is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Science and director of the Institute for Computational Molecular Science in the college of science and technology at Temple University in Philadelphia, US. He was previously the Hepburn Professor of Physical Science in the Center for Molecular Modeling at the University of Pennsylvania.
Laurence David Barron has been Gardiner Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow since 1998. He is a chemist who has conducted pioneering research into the properties of chiral molecules — defined by Lord Kelvin as those that cannot be superimposed onto their mirror image. By extending this definition of chirality to include moving particles and processes that vary with time, he has made a fundamental theoretical contribution to the field. Chiral molecules such as amino acids, sugars, proteins, and nucleic acids play a central role in the chemistry of life, and many drug molecules are chiral. Laurence's work on Raman optical activity — a spectroscopic technique capable of determining the three-dimensional structures of chiral molecules, which he predicted, observed, and applied to problems at the forefront of chemistry and structural biology — has led to its development as a powerful analytical tool used in academic and industrial laboratories worldwide. His much-cited book, Molecular Light Scattering and Optical Activity, has contributed to the growing impact of chirality on many areas of modern science.
John Lawrence CardyFRS is a British–American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work in theoretical condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics, and in particular for research on critical phenomena and two-dimensional conformal field theory.
Peter Nigel Tripp Unwin FRS is a British scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he was Head of the Neurobiology Division from 1992 until 2008. He is currently also Emeritus Professor of Cell Biology at the Scripps Research Institute.
Raymond Ethan Goldstein FRS FInstP is the Alan Turing Professor of Complex Physical Systems in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Sara Imari Walker is an American theoretical physicist and astrobiologist with research interests in the origins of life, astrobiology, physics of life, emergence, complex and dynamical systems, and artificial life. Walker is deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University (ASU), associate director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems and an associate professor at ASU. She is a co-founder of the astrobiology social network SAGANet, and on the board of directors for Blue Marble Space, a nonprofit education and science organization. As a science communicator, she is a frequent guest on podcasts and series, such as Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.
Jorge V. José is a Mexican/American physicist born in Mexico City. Currently the James H. Rudy Distinguished Professor of Physics at Indiana University. He has made seminal contributions to research in a variety of disciplines, including condensed matter physics, nonlinear dynamics, quantum chaos, biological physics, computational neuroscience and lately precision psychiatry. His pioneering work on the two-dimensional x-y model has been exceedingly influential in many areas of physics and has garnered many citations. He edited the book on the “40 Years of Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless Theory”, on two-dimensional topological phase transitions in 2013. Three years later KT were awarded the 2016 Nobel Physics Prize.
Amnon Aharony is an Israeli Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, Israel and in the Physics Department of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. After years of research on statistical physics, his current research focuses on condensed matter theory, especially in mesoscopic physics and spintronics. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of several other academies. He also received several prizes, including the Rothschild Prize in Physical Sciences, and the Gunnar Randers Research Prize, awarded every other year by the King of Norway.
