David R. Nelson is an American physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

, and Arthur K. Solomon Professor of Biophysics, at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

.

Nelson graduated from Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 Summa cum laude in 1972, with a MS in 1974, and with a Ph.D. in 1975. Since 1997 he has been a professor at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

His research is in the field of condensed matter. Together with Bertrand Halperin

Bertrand Halperin

Bertrand I. Halperin is the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the physics department of Harvard University.He grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He attended Harvard University , and did his graduate work at Berkeley with John J. Hopfield .In the 1970s, he, together with...

, he has established the theory of dislocation-mediated melting in two dimensions.

Awards

• 1984 MacArthur Fellows Program
  MacArthur Fellows Program
  The MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T...
  
  
• 1995 Harvard Ledlie Prize of Harvard University
  Harvard University
  Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
  
  
• 1993-1994 Guggenheim Fellowship
  Guggenheim Fellowship
  Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
  
  
• 1986 Award for Initiatives in Research from the National Academy of Sciences
  United States National Academy of Sciences
  The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
  
  
• 1979-1983 AP Sloan Fellowship

Works

• D.R. Nelson and B.I. Halperin, "Dislocation-mediated melting in two dimensions." Phys. Rev. B 19: 2457 (1979).
• D.R. Nelson, "Order frustration and defects in liquids and glasses." Phys. Rev. B 28: 5515 (1983).
• D.R. Nelson and L. Peliti, "Fluctuations in membranes with crystalline and hexatic order." Journal de Physique 48: 1085 (1987).
• D.R. Nelson, "Vortex entanglement in high temperature superconductors." Phys. Rev. Lett. 60: 1973 (1988).
• D.R. Nelson and V. Vinokur, "Boson localization and correlated pinning of superconducting vortex arrays." Phys. Rev. B 48: 13060 (1993).
• N. Hatano and D.R. Nelson, "Vortex pinning and non-Hermitian quantum mechanics." Phys. Rev. B 56: 8651 (1997).
• D.R. Nelson and N. Shnerb, "Non-Hermitian localization and population biology." Phys. Rev. E 58: 1383 (1998).
• D. Lubensky and D.R. Nelson, "Single molecule statistics and the polynucleotide unzipping transition," Phys. Rev. E 65, 03917 (2002).

External links

• ISI Web of Knowledge Retrieved on 5 October 2009.
• "DNA unzipping and motor proteins: Effect of the genetic code" Retrieved on 5 October 2009.
• "David R. Nelson", Scientific Commons