Congratulations to Professor Leo Radzihovsky, who was recently named a 2014 Simons Foundation Investigator. The award was announced in July.
According to the Foundation Web site, "The Simons Investigators program provides a stable base of support for outstanding scientists, enabling them to undertake long-term study of fundamental questions."
Leo Radzihovsky is a condensed matter physicist whose work bridges the divide between the classical and quantum aspects of the subject, using mathematical tools and insights developed in one field to make seminal contributions in the other. His focus is on systems where fluctuations and heterogeneity play qualitative roles. He is known for his work on bent-core and other exotic liquid crystals; on fluctuating membranes and driven elastic media in the presence of quenched disorder, including the prediction of the transverse smectic phase; and on degenerate atomic gasses, where his rigorous work on the BCS-BEC crossover, particularly in systems with narrow Feshbach resonances, with and without “spin” imbalance, uncovered a host of new phenomena including topological phase transitions.