Jainendra Jain Named a Fellow if the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Jainendra K. Jain, the Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics at Penn State University, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed by peers upon members of the AAAS, the world's largest general scientific society and the publisher of the journal Science. Jain was recognized for his work on "the prediction of composite fermions."

A faculty member in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State, Jain is a condensed-matter theorist who studies the physics of states of matter in which electrons behave in cooperative and unexpected ways. He is best known for predicting exotic particles, named composite fermions, to explain the surprising phenomenon known as the fractional quantum Hall effect, whose discoverers, Horst Stormer and Daniel Tsui, shared the 1998 Nobel prize in physics.

Jain was a co-recipient of the Oliver E. Buckley Prize in 2002, awarded by the American Physical Society for his establishment of "the composite-fermion model for the half-filled Landau level and other quantized Hall systems." The prize was endowed in 1952 by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and is the highest prize in the United States in the field of condensed-matter physics.

Jain is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. He received the Distinguished Postdoctoral Alumnus Award from the University of Maryland in 2004, the ACIPA Distinguished Scholar Prize of the Indian Physics Association in 2008, and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur in 2010. He is a co-author of more than 150 scholarly articles and a monograph titled "Composite Fermions," published by the Cambridge University Press in 2007.

Jain earned his bachelor's degree at the Maharaja College in Jaipur, India, in 1979; his master's degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1981; and his doctoral degree at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook in 1985. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Maryland from 1986 to 1988 and an associate research scientist at Yale University from 1988 to 1989. He joined SUNY at Stony Brook as an assistant professor in 1989, was promoted to associate professor in 1993, and to professor in 1997. He joined Penn State in the fall of 1998 as Penn State's first Erwin W. Mueller professor of physics.