Jürg Fröhlich elected member of the National Academy of Sciences
- Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP)
- Lectureships and honours
The National Academy of Sciences (US) has announced the election of 26 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research, among them ETH physicist Jürg Fröhlich.
During its 157th Annual Meeting, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) elected 120 members and 26 international members. With the newly elected members, the total number of active members has come to 2,403, and the total number of international members to 501.
With the election of Jürg Fröhlich has therefore entered an elect circle of scientists whose significant contributions to science have been recognised by the NAS. He joins T. Maurice Rice (elected 1993) and Gabriel Aeppli (elected 2015) as the third Department of Physics professor who is currently an active member of the NAS.
Professor Fröhlich has been Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich from 1982 until his retirement in 2011. He studied physics at ETH Zurich from 1965 to 1969, and between 1969 and 1972, he was a graduate student at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, under the supervision of Prof. Klaus Hepp. In the summer of 1972, he received his Ph.D. degree with a dissertation on the infrared problem in quantum field theory.
He spent the academic year 1972/73 at the University of Geneva. From 1973 until 1974, he was a research fellow at Harvard University. Subsequently, he was an assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton University. In January 1978, he transferred to the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques near Paris, where he worked as a 'professeur permanent' until the summer of 1982. In the fall of 1982, he returned to the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich. He has been on sabbatical leave at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques at Bures-sur-Yvette.
Jürg Fröhlich's main research interests are in quantum field theory, classical mechanics and quantum theory of systems with many degrees of freedom, in statistical physics and in mathematical methods of theoretical physics. For his scientific work he has been awarded the national Latsis Prize (1984), the Dannie Haineman Prize of the APS and AIP (1991), the Marcel Benoist Prize (1998), the Max-Planck Medal (2001) and the Henri Poincaré Prize (2009). Since 1993, he is a member of the Academia Europaea.
The National Academy of Sciences
The external page National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and — with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine — provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the US government and other organizations.