Christopher Jarzynski

Christopher Jarzynski is an American physicist and Distinguished University Professor at University of Maryland's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Department of Physics, and Institute for Physical Science and Technology, and fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.[1][2][3] He is known for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, for which he was awarded the 2019 Lars Onsager Prize.[4] In 1997, he derived the now famous Jarzynski equality, confirmation of which was cited by the Nobel Committee for Physics as an application of one of the winning inventions of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics—optical tweezers.[2][5]

Christopher Jarzynski
Alma mater	Princeton University University of California, Berkeley
Awards	Sacler Prize Onsager Prize American Physical Society Fellow American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow Simons Fellow Guggenheim Fellow Member of the National Academy of Sciences
Scientific career
Doctoral advisor	Władysław J. Świątecki Robert Grayson Littlejohn
Website	http://www.chem.umd.edu/faculty-staff-directory/facultydirectory/christopher-jarzynski

Education and research

Jarzynski received his A.B. (with high honors) in 1987 from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in 1994 from University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Władysław J. Świątecki and Robert Grayson Littlejohn.[1][4][6][7]

At University of Califaornia, Berkley, Jarzynski studied adiabatic invariants in chaotic classical systems. After graduating with a PhD, he spent ten years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and since 2006 he has been faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research is primarily in the area of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, where he has contributed to an understanding of how the laws of thermodynamics apply to nanoscale systems. In 1997, he derived an equality, now known as the Jarzynski equality, that relates nonequilibrium fluctuations to equilibrium free energy differences, a result that has been verified in numerous experiments and has found applications in biophysics and computational chemistry. His current interests also include the thermodynamics of information processing, as well as shortcuts to adiabaticity in quantum, classical and stochastic systems.

Awards and honours

He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, and the 2019 Lars Onsager Prize [8]. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[1][4][6] In 2020 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and Simons Fellowship.[3][9][10]

Jarzynski is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, and an associate editor of the Journal of Statistical Physics.[1][6]

References

1. "Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry – University of Maryland, College Park MD Christopher Jarzynski - Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry". Retrieved 2019-08-14.
2. Ying, Irene (2018-11-06). "UMD's Christopher Jarzynski Awarded American Physical Society's Lars Onsager Prize". College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. Retrieved 2019-08-14.
3. abbyr (2020-04-27). "UMD's Christopher Jarzynski Elected to the National Academy of Sciences". College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. Retrieved 2020-04-30.
4. "2018 Stanley Corrsin Award Recipient". www.aps.org. Retrieved 2019-08-14.
5. "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 2019-08-14.
6. Jarzynski, Christopher. "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Retrieved 2019-08-14.
7. "Christopher Jarzynski - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu. Retrieved 2019-08-14.
8. "2018 Stanley Corrsin Award Recipient". www.aps.org. Retrieved 2020-04-24.
9. "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Christopher Jarzynski". Retrieved 2020-04-30.
10. "2020 Simons Fellows in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Announced". Simons Foundation. 2020-02-21. Retrieved 2020-04-30.