Prize Recipient

"For ongoing commitment to developing physics in Africa through initiating the African School on Electronic Structure Methods and Applications and leadership in bringing together African physicists from across the continent to create a Pan-African physics communication vehicle."

James E. Gubernatis received his B.S. degree in physics from Loyola College (now Loyola University Maryland) in 1967 and his Ph.D. degree in physics from Case Western Reserve University in 1972 under the supervision of P. L. Taylor. After a post-doctoral position at Cornell University under the mentorship of J. A. Krumhansl, he joined the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a technical staff member, a position he held until his retirement in 2018. During his career, he organized or co-organized multiple international conferences and workshops promoting computational physics in general and the applications and development of quantum Monte Carlo methods. For nine years, he was the United States representative to IUPAP’s Commission on Computational Physics. While chair of that commission, he co-founded the biennial African School on Electronic Structure Methods and Applications. Later, as a member of the APS’s Committee on International Scientific Affairs, he led an international effort to survey the state of physics in Africa. The results of this survey prompted him to cofound the African Physics Newsletter, an email quarterly whose content is assembled by African physicists and published by the APS. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the South African Institute of Physics.