Profile
Nigel holds the Chancellor's Distinguished
Professorship in Physics and joined UCSD in Fall 2021
after 36 years at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Nigel's research spans condensed
matter theory, the theory of living systems, hydrodynamics
and non-equilibrium statistical physics.
Nigel received his Ph.D in theoretical
physics from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 1982,
and for the years 1982-1985 was a postdoctoral fellow at
the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of
California at Santa Barbara, where his work on the
dynamics of snowflake growth helped launch the modern
theory of pattern formation in nature.
He joined the condensed matter theory group at
the Department of Physics, UIUC in 1985, where his work
was instrumental to the discovery of d-wave pairing in
high temperature superconductors. In
1996, Nigel co-founded NumeriX, a company that develops
high-performance software for pricing and risk managing
derivative securities. Nigel's interests in biology
include microbial ecology, evolution and systems biology. He was a
founding member of the Institute for Genomic Biology at
UIUC, where he led the Biocomplexity Group and directed
the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology. During the
COVID-19 pandemic, he pivoted from his experience in
mathematical modeling of bacteria and viruses to
computational epidemiology, advising the Governor of
Illinois, and helping devise, set up and run the COVID
saliva testing system at UIUC, which provided ~12 hour
turnaround of PCR tests to the 50,000 people in the campus
community and eventually to over 1700 schools and other
institutions in Illinois and beyond.
Nigel has served on the editorial boards of
several journals, including The Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society, Physical
Biology and
the International Journal of Theoretical and
Applied Finance. Selected honours include: Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, University Scholar of the
University of Illinois, the Xerox Award for research, the
A. Nordsieck award for excellence in graduate teaching and
the American Physical Society's Leo P. Kadanoff Prize
2020. Nigel is a Fellow of the American Physical Society,
a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK) and
a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Current
Research Interests: please see Nigel's research
group's homepage.
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