David Ceperley, research scientist with NCSA's Applications Group, won the fifth Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal for his contributions to computational many-body physics. His work has opened a new era of understanding strongly interacting quantum systems and paved the way to quantitative microscopic prediction of the properties of real, complex materials.
Among Ceperley's celebrated work are calculations he performed, with Richard Martin and Vinnie Natolie, on NCSA's CRAY Y/MP system to establish the series of crystalline phase transitions hydrogen undergoes as it is compressed to several million atmospheres of pressure, a condition present in the interiors of giant planets.
The Feenberg medal is presented every two to three years at the Conference on Recent Progress in Many Body Theories. It was first awarded in 1985, and it is named in honor of Eugene Feenberg to commemorate his accomplishments and contributions to physics. Past recipients are David Pines (1985), John W. Clark (1987), Malvin H. Kalos (1989), and Walter Kohn (1991).
Feenberg held the Wayman Crow Professorship at Washington University, St. Louis, in the 1970s. He hoped science would be able to transcend model problems and make quantitatively accurate predictions of the properties of strongly interacting quantum systems under realistic conditions. Ceperley has done just that for a wide range of quantum many-body systems.
Ceperley's most notable contribution has been the calculation, with Berni Alder, of the energy of an electron liquid. The computation is arguably valuable; it provides basic input data for virtually every current numerical application of density functional theory to electronic systems.
Ceperley is a full professor of physics at UIUC. He has a bachelor's in physics and mathematics from the University of Michigan and a doctorate in physics from Cornell University, where Kalos was his mentor.
