John PerdewProfessor

John Perdew received his Ph.D in physics from Cornell University in 1971. He was a postdoc at the University of Toronto and at Rutgers University. In 1979 he joined the faculty at Tulane University as Assistant Professor of Physics. He became Full Professor in 1982. In 2013 he moved to the College of Science and Technology at Temple University as the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Physics and Chemistry. He is the founding director of the Center for Materials Theory at Temple.
The National Academy of Science election citation says: “Perdew has led the effort to put a sound mathematical and physical foundation under the conceptual ideas of Density Functional Theory. Perdew derived exact properties of the exchange-correlation energy, using exact constraints to construct the approximations widely used for applications across condensed matter physics, chemistry and material science”. His work on density functional theory has made him one of the world’s most cited phycisists. Professor Perdew has five co-authored works among the 11 most-cited physics papers published 1981-2010, and two among the 100 most-cited scholarly articles of all time (Nature 514, 550 [2014]).