Jainendra K. Jain Honored by American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Jainendra K. Jain, the Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics at Penn State University in the United States, has been named a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy research centers. Jain is among the 190 new Fellows and 22 Foreign Honorary Members drawn from the sciences, the arts and humanities, business, public affairs and the nonprofit sector to be selected for the honor this year.

A faculty member in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State, Jain is a condensed-matter theorist who is interested in the physics of low-dimensional systems, especially those states in which electrons behave in cooperative ways leading to unexpected emergent behaviors. 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 "establishing 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 received a Distinguished Postdoctoral Alumnus Award from the University of Maryland in 2004 and the ACIPA Distinguished Scholar Prize of the Indian Physics Association in 2008. He is a co-author of 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.