Congratulations to John Clark

I am pleased to tell you that John Walter Clark will be named on October 1, 1999, the Wayman Crow Professor of Physics. The installation ceremony will take place in spring 2000.

John Clark received a B.S. in 1955 and an M.A. in 1957, both from the University of Texas, Austin, and a Ph.D. in 1959 from Washington University. During the years 1959 to 1963 he was successively a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow with Eugene Wigner at Princeton University, an associate research scientist at the Martin Company, Denver, and a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow both at the University of Birmingham, England, and the French nuclear research establishment in Saclay. He joined the Washington University faculty in 1963 as Assistant Professor of Physics and was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1965. He was promoted to associate professor in 1966 and full professor in 1972, and he served as interim chair of the Department of Physics during 1996-1997.

Professor Clark's career is distinguished by a wide-ranging involvement in both traditional and non-traditional branches of theoretical physics. For three decades he has played a leading role in the development and application of flexible and robust methods for quantitative prediction of the properties of strongly interacting quantum many-particle systems. These methods, most notably the theory of correlated basis functions, have yielded fundamental new insights into the nature of the matter inside nuclei and neutron stars, the exotic quantum phenomena of superfluidity and Bose-Einstein condensation in quantum fluids, and the properties of strongly-coupled electron systems and lattice-spin models. In recognition of his pioneering work in this field, Clark was awarded the Eugene Feenberg Medal for Many-Body Physics in 1987.

Since the mid-1970's, John Clark's research has been increasingly cross-disciplinary in character. An early interest in neural networks as models for brain function led to studies of the complex dynamical behavior and statistical properties of these systems, as well as learning rules that allow them to store and retrieve information. Yet another line of research, conducted in the 1980's with Professor T. J. Tarn of the Department of Systems Science & Mathematics, resulted in papers that provide the theoretical foundation for the burgeoning field of quantum control. Active control of quantum mechanical systems is at the heart of laser manipulation of chemical reactions and proposed designs for quantum computers.

Clark's published work includes some two hundred articles in professional journals and topical volumes. He has co-edited and co-authored six books, including _Scientific Applications of Neural Nets_, published in 1999 by Springer-Verlag. His current research continues to span a broad spectrum - nucleonic superfluidity in neutron stars, broken symmetries in liquid helium, short-range correlations in electron-nucleus scattering, database mining in nuclear physics, and quantum control theory. Working with faculty in the Washington University School of Medicine, he is engaged in theoretical research in neural information processing and computational neuroscience that is centered on the joint supervision of Ph.D. candidates interested in theoretical biology.

A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Clark has served his professional communities, both national and global, in many capacities. He is on the editorial boards of the annual series _Condensed Matter Theories_ and _Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory_. He has worked on the organizing or program committees of over twenty scientific meetings in several fields, and is a member of the standing advisory committees of two continuing conference series that he helped to establish. As a trustee of the International Workshops on Condensed Matter Theories, one of the longest running annual international meetings in physics and an important forum for physicists of the developing world, he has long been active in the promotion of scientific exchanges and collaborations between researchers from diverse cultures.

Professor Clark has taught an unusually wide assortment of courses, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Since 1983, he has offered a special-topics, term-project course in neural modeling called "Physics of the Brain," which has traditionally attracted some of the most talented undergraduate students in the university. He has supervised the research of more than twenty Ph.D. recipients, ten of whom have held tenured faculty positions. In addition to his service as interim chair and associate chair of Physics, Clark has been a member of nearly every departmental committee. His school involvements have included the Review Committee on Faculty Personnel Procedures, the Advisory Committee on Tenure, Promotion, and Personnel, and the Washington University/Howard Hughes Medical Institute Advisory Council.

The Wayman Crow Professorship of Physics was established in 1860 to honor Wayman Crow, who together with William Greenleaf Eliot, was responsible for the founding of Washington University. On February 22, 1853, during his second term in the State Senate of Missouri, Wayman Crow secured from the Missouri Legislature the charter for an institution of higher learning, which he gave the name of Eliot Seminary in tribute to his friend's interest in education. (A modest man, Eliot thought the name too local and restrictive, so in deference to his wishes, the name was officially changed to Washington University in 1857). The securing of the charter was entirely the idea of Wayman Crow, while the bringing of this idea to fulfillment was largely the work of William Greenleaf Eliot. At various times, each publicly proclaimed the other as the founder of Washington University.

The Wayman Crow Professorship of Physics has been held previously by six distinguished physicists: Francis Eugene Nipher 1875-1914; Arthur Holly Compton, 1920-1923; Arthur Llewelyn Hughes, 1923-1955; Edward U. Condon, 1958-1964; Eugene Feenberg, 1964-1975; and Edwin Jaynes, 1975-1998.

Edward S. Macias
1999