Chan Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

1 December 2006—Moses Chan, Evan Pugh Professor of Physics, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society. The honor is given to members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science whose "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished." The award will be presented to 449 individuals during the 2007 AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California. 

Chan's research is aimed at answering, or raising, fundamental questions about matter in its various phases or states such as liquid, solid, and gas. He is particularly interested in phase transitions--the conditions under which a material changes from one phase to another--in quantum fluids, in reduced dimensions, and in the presence of disorder. The principles he and his research group have helped to establish have proven to be useful in understanding a wide variety of problems in condensed-matter systems undergoing phase transitions. Recently, Chan received international acclaim for his discovery, with graduate student Eun-Seong Kim, of a new phase of matter, a "supersolid" form of helium-4 with the extraordinary frictionless-flow properties of a superfluid. Another of the major achievements of Chan's research group was the confirmation in 1984 of one of the most important theories in modern statistical mechanics, known as the two-dimensional Ising Model, which until the work of Chan and his group had not been tested experimentally since it was first proposed 40 years earlier.

Chan has been honored with a Senior Research Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1982, with a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, with selection as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1987, with the Fritz London Prize in Low-Temperature Physics in 1996, with election as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2000, and with election as a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

Chan earned a bachelor's degree in physics, magna cum laude, at Bridgewater College in Virginia in 1967, then enrolled in the physics department at Cornell University, where he earned a master's degree in 1969 and a doctoral degree in 1974. He was an assistant lecturer at the University of Hong Kong from 1969 to 1970, a research associate and instructor at Duke University from 1973 to 1976, and an assistant professor of physics at the University of Toledo from 1976 to 1979, when he joined the Penn State faculty as an assistant professor of physics. At Penn State, he was promoted to associate professor in 1984 and to professor in 1986, then was honored with the titles of Distinguished Professor of Physics in 1990 and Evan Pugh Professor of Physics in 1994. Chan has trained twenty-one graduate students in his laboratory and has sponsored 15 postdoctoral scholars at Penn State in addition to developing and teaching physics courses at the introductory, advanced undergraduate, and graduate levels.

[ BKK / MC / L A K ]