Current Recipient

Professor Marvin L. Cohen

Dr. Joseph Z. Dickson, a Pittsburgh physician, and his wife, Agnes Fisher Dickson, provided funds in their wills for Carnegie Mellon University to award an annual prize to individuals who make outstanding contributions to science in the United States.

This year's Dickson Prize awardee is theoretical condensed matter physicist Marvin L. Cohen, who is world-renowned for creating and applying quantum theories to explain and predict the properties of materials. Cohen's research has helped to form the basis for the modern day study of semiconductor physics and nanoscience.

Having contributed to more than 780 technical publications, Cohen has been ranked among the top physicists in the world for the impact of his published work.

Cohen is a University Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been a member of the physics faculty since 1964. He is also a senior faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a position he has held since 1965. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty, he completed his doctorate at the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral position with the Theory Group at Bell Laboratories.

Cohen is a recipient of a number of prestigious prizes including the National Medal of Science, the APS Oliver E. Buckley Prize for Solid State Physics, the APS Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize, the Foresight Institute Richard P. Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, the Technology Pioneer Award from the World Economic Forum and the Berkeley Citation. He received awards from the Department of Energy for Outstanding Accomplishment in Solids State Physics and for Sustained Outstanding Research.

He is a Fellow and past-president of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association.