Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Godfrey Gumbs
Hunter College, CUNY

Citation:

"For pioneering contributions to our understanding of low-dimensional heterostructures; and for leadership in recruitment, retention, and mentoring of under-represented minority students."

Background:

Godfrey Gumbs is The Maria A. Chianta and Alice M. Stoll Professor of Physics at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He received his B.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1971 and his M. Sc. and Ph. D. degrees in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Toronto in 1973 and 1978, respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa (1978-1982) and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada University Research Fellow and Assistant/Associate Professor of Physics from 1982-1991. In 1992, he joined the faculty of the City University of New York as Professor of Physics. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK), the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and a KITP (Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics) Scholar at The University of California in Santa Barbara. He has made important and fundamental contributions to condensed matter physics. His research has focused on electron transport and optical response in semiconductor heterostructures such as the two-dimensional electron and hole gases in addition to lower-dimensional quantum structures such as quantum dots and antidots, quantum wires as well as nanotubes. He has employed both analytical and numerical methods in dealing with these problems. They include many-body diagrammatic techniques and molecular dynamics simulations. He is currently involved in a project dealing with single-electron transport and its applications to quantum computing, single-photon sources and detectors using surface acoustic waves in piezoelectric materials.


Selection Committee:

David Campbell (Chair), Laura Greene (12/04), Juan Maldacena ('04 winner)(12/04), Peter F. Green (V. Chair)(12/05), Paula Hammond (12/05)