Gregory Boebinger
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Chair-Elect, Nominating Committee
Biographical Summary
Greg Boebinger is director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) and a Professor of Physics at Florida State University and the University of Florida.
Dr. Boebinger received his Ph.D in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 where he was a Hertz Fellow and Karl Taylor Compton Fellow during his research measuring the magnetic field dependence of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE).
His research career has been centered on the utilization of intense magnetic fields as a thermodynamic parameter to access and elucidate new correlated electron phases. Most recently, he has pioneered the use of intense magnetic fields (>30T) to suppress the superconducting phase of the high-temperature superconductors to reveal the properties of their resistive states at low temperatures. Prior to MIT, he was a Churchill Fellow at the University of Cambridge, working on the then-newly-discovered organic superconductors, focusing on structural phase transitions underlying magnetic ordering. After MIT, he received a NATO Fellowship to the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. In 1987, he joined Bell Laboratories where he engineered and constructed with his colleague a pulsed magnetic field program that was the first to achieve millisecond-duration magnetic fields exceeding 70T. His high-magnetic-field research included resonant tunneling spectroscopy, chaos in quantum wells, new correlated electron states in double-quantum wells, and the low-temperature behavior of the high temperature superconductors in the absence of superconductivity. His research has continued while MagLab Center Leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1998-2004) and MagLab Director (2004-present) responsible for all three MagLab campuses: at Florida State University, the University of Florida and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among his service on numerous boards and committees is his chairing of the Neutron Advisory Board for Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For the APS, he has served on the Buckley Prize Selection Committee and the Committee on Meetings during the shift from the notorious ‘phone book’ to wireless. His outreach includes dozens of public lectures and demonstrations appearing on the History Channel and Discovery Channel.
Candidate's Statement
The American Physical Society continues to be a very effective steward of physics research in the United States, due in large part to the quality of the slate of candidates for APS elections that have been provided by the Nomination Committee. In my opinion, a successful candidate for the Chair-Elect position of the APS Nomination Committee must have a strong and extensive network of colleagues who can be approached for advice on potential candidates, candidates who have not only the ‘on-paper’ credentials but also the additional skills needed for the particular position considered.
Nobody knows everyone, of course. As such, another requirement is the ability and desire to seek and network rapidly among newly-introduced groups of colleagues in physics. This is particularly important in providing attention to diversity, both through inclusion of underrepresented groups and in providing balance among physics sub-disciplines, in developing the slate of APS candidates.
The Nomination Committee must be keenly aware that the APS plays an increasingly important role in publicizing the value of physics research to the United States government and the general public. Although the America COMPETES Act authorizes increased funding in the physical sciences, and new funding opportunities are apparently developing in energy, security, and the environment, these initiatives have not yet resulted in stable long-term funding.
Science funding at merely subsistence levels over recent decades has been bipartisan. Building and maintaining increased and stable funding of physics must be similarly bipartisan. Success will require strong leadership and even stronger political awareness and communication skills among the slate of candidates put forth by the APS Nomination Committee. I would be pleased to assist in this effort on behalf of the APS and the health of physics in the United States.
