Prize Recipient

Soon Yong Chang
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Citation:

"For so productively bringing state-of-the-art computational methods, developed in nuclear matter theory, to condensed matter many-body problems, especially ultracold trapped atomic Fermi systems."

Background:

Soon Yong Chang is native of Seoul, South Korea. He received his Ph.D. in physics in May-2006 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Under the guidance of Prof. Vijay R. Pandharipande, he applied the Green's Function Monte Carlo methods to the study of the strongly interacting dilute Fermi gases. For this work, he was given Felix Adler fellowship award by the UIUC. Soon Yong received his Licenciado degree in physics from the National University of Cordoba (Argentina) in 1997. After a brief foray into industry, he returned to academia, earning an MSc. in theoretical physics from the SDSU in 2001 and moved to Champaign, Illinois to pursue the Ph.D. in physics. Soon Yong and collaborators succeeded in introducing the fermion wave function with the superfluid correlation valid at a broad regime of interaction. Soon Yong is now a postdoctoral research associate at the INT-University of Washington in Seattle. He has a broad interest in condensed matter physics, material physics, and general many-body physics among others. He remains focused on producing accurate physical results with the ground on the sound theoretical foundation.