Two University of Colorado at Boulder physics professors have been elected to two of the most prestigious national academies for scientists.
CU-Boulder physics Professor Noel Clark was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and Deborah Jin, an adjoint associate professor of physics at CU-Boulder and a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Clark was one of 72 new members elected to the National Academy of Sciences, founded in 1863 and considered one of the highest honors for an American scientist or engineer. He was the only Colorado scientist elected in 2007.
Clark joined the CU-Boulder faculty in 1977 and is director of the Liquid Crystal Materials Research Center at CU-Boulder. Funded by a $6 million National Science Foundation grant, the center brings together faculty, graduate and undergraduate students from physics, chemistry and engineering to develop novel liquid crystal science and applications.
Much of Clark's research has focused on the physics and applications of ferroelectric liquid crystals. Most notably, Clark is credited with developing electro-optic light valves in the mid-1980s. The groundbreaking devices use a ferroelectric liquid crystal between closely spaced glass plates and do all the things liquid crystals do, but much faster.
Clark has held Guggenheim and Humboldt fellowships and is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He won the American Physical Society's 2006 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize in recognition of his work in liquid crystals.
Jin was one of 203 new fellows elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences along with former Vice President Al Gore, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The AAAS was founded in 1780.
Jin received her doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago in 1995. She spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NIST, before being named a NIST physicist and an assistant adjoint professor at CU-Boulder in 1997.
In 2003, Jin and CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Markus Greiner and graduate student Cindy Regal coaxed atoms into the first "fermionic condensate," a new form of matter that may help physicists unlock mysteries of high-temperature superconductivity. That same year Jin was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as a "genius grant," for her research achievements. She is a JILA fellow and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.
CU-Boulder's department of physics is part of the College of Arts and Sciences.