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People > John D. Joannopoulos >
Biographical Background
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John D. Joannopoulos
Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics
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Biographical Background
Professor John D. Joannopoulos is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is appointed as the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics at MIT. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968 and 1974 respectively, and joined the MIT faculty in 1974.
He is the author or coauthor of more than 350 journal articles, a textbook, Photonic Crystals, and 20 U.S. Patents. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Materials Research Society, a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1983), and was both an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1976-1980), and a John S. Guggenheim Fellow (1981-1982). Professor Joannopoulos is the recipient of the MIT School of Science Graduate Teaching Award (1991), the William Buechner Teaching Prize of the Department of Physics (1996), and the David Adler Award of the American Physical Society (1997). He is a former Divisional Associate Editor of Physical Review Letters, and former Member of the Editorial Board of Reviews of Modern Physics.
The research of Professor Joannopoulos spans two major directions. The first is devoted to creating a realistic and microscopic theoretical description of the properties of material systems. His approach is fundamental to predicting geometric, electronic and dynamical structure, ab-initio—that is, given only the atomic numbers of the constituent atoms as experimental input. Ab-initio investigations are invaluable because they can stand on their own, complement experimental observations, and probe into regimes inaccessible to experiment.
The second major direction involves the development of a new class of materials called photonic crystals, which are designed to effect the properties of photons in much the same way that semiconductors effect the properties of electrons. These materials provide a new dimension in the ability to control and mold the flow of light.
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