Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Robert H. Austin
Princeton University

Citation:

"For his wide-ranging contributions to biological physics encompassing all scales from the molecular to that of organismic populations. His early insights on how nanotechnology and microfabrication can be employed have uncovered both new physics and revolutionized the laboratory practice of biology."

Background:

Professor Robert H. Austin received his B.A. in Physics from Hope College in Holland, Michigan and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 1975. He did a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry from 1976–1979 and has been with the Department of Physics of Princeton University from 1979 to the present, achieving the rank of Professor of Physics in 1989.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, a member of the National Academy of Sciences USA, and a member of the American Association of Arts and Sciences. He has served as a President of the Division of Biological Physics of the American Physical Society, and Chair of the U.S. Liaison Committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He has served as the biological physics editor for Physical Review Letters, serves on numerous review panels for National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and was the founding Editor of the Virtual Journal of Biological Physics and a founding Editor of AIP Advances. He won the 2005 Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society.


Selection Committee:

Angel Garcia, Chair; I. Schlitching; M. Wang; P. Wolynes; W. Eaton