MemberDavid P. Landau

Professor David P. Landau is the Distinguished Research Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for Simulational Physics at the University of Georgia. He received a B.A. in physics from Princeton University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Yale University. After a postdoctoral year at the CNRS in Grenoble, France he returned to teach at Yale before moving to the University of Georgia.

David Landau has over 450 research publications primarily involving the development and use of computer simulation methods to study the statics and dynamics of phase transitions. For this work he was awarded the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics by the American Physical Society (APS). He has lectured at many summer schools, published multiple pedagogical papers, and co-authored a widely used textbook on Monte Carlo methods published by Cambridge University Press. In 1987 he created a Workshop Series in Simulational Physics and helped initiate similar workshop series in Brazil and China. For his many outreach activities he received the Nicholson Medal for Human Outreach from the APS.

David Landau served as Chair of the Division of Computational Physics (DCOMP) of the APS and was Chair of the IUPAP International Conference on Computational Physics CCP1999. He was also Divisional Councillor for DCOMP and served on the APS Governing Council. He has been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Senior Guangbiao Distinguished Professor at Zhejiang U. in China, Adjunct Professor at Aalto U. in Finland, MAINZ Visiting Professor in Germany, and received an Alexander von Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award in Germany. He is a Corresponding Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and received a Doctor Honoris Causa from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. He is currently Chair of the C20 Commission on Computational Physics for the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

He has been a member of Heidelberg University’s Academic Advisory Council since 2014.