H. Eugene Stanley

Professor Emeritus (Physics, BME, MSE)

Office 590 Commonwealth Ave, SCI 204B
Email hes@bu.edu
Phone 617-353-2617
Website Professor H. Eugene Stanley's Home Page

Honors and Awards

Fellow, National Academy of Sciences, 2004
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1994
Co Editor-in-Chief, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications , 1988 – Present
Fellow, American Physical Society, 1974

Areas of Interest

Statistical physics of materials.

Research Areas

Gene Stanley was born in Oklahoma City and obtained his B.A. in physics at Wesleyan University in 1962. He performed biological physics research with Max Delbrueck in 1963 (funded by a Fulbright in Germany) and was awarded the Ph.D. in physics at Harvard in 1967 after completing a thesis on critical phenomena in magnetic systems under the guidance of T. A. Kaplan and J. H. Van Vleck. Stanley was a Miller Fellow at Berkeley with C. Kittel, where he wrote an Oxford monograph, INTRODUCTION TO PHASE TRANSITIONS AND CRITICAL PHENOMENA, which won the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book of 1971. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT in 1969 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1971. He was appointed Herman von Helmholtz Associate Professor in 1973 in recognition of his interdepartmental teaching and research with the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. In 1976 Stanley joined Boston University as Professor of Physics and Associate Professor of Physiology (in the School of Medicine). In 1978 and 1979, he was promoted to Professor of Physiology and University Professor, respectively. In 2007 he was offered joint appointments with the Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering Departments. He is currently honorary professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Pavia, and at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest. Stanley works in collaboration with students and colleagues attempting to understand puzzles of interdisciplinary science. His main current focus is understanding the anomalous behavior of liquid water in bulk, nanoconfined, and biological environments. He has also worked on a range of other topics in complex systems, such as quantifying correlations among the constituents of the Alzheimer brain, and quantifying fluctuations in noncoding and coding DNA sequences, interbeat intervals of the healthy and diseased heart. His publications have received 38,537 citations [31,968 to articles and 6569 to books] his “Hirsch index is 90”:http://argento.bu.edu/hes/articles/highlycited.html. Two of his papers were reproduced in THE PHYSICAL REVIEW, THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS: A SELECTION OF SEMINAL PAPERS AND COMMENTARIES. Stanley has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and is an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Physical Society and an Honorary Professor at Eotvos Lorand University (Budapest). Stanley received the Boltzmann Medal, given by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), and the Teresiana Medal in Complex Systems Research given by the University of Pavia. He also received the “Distinguished Teaching Scholar” Director’s Award from the National Science Foundation, the APS Nicholson Medal for Human Outreach, a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the David Turnbull Prize, a BP Venture Research Award, the Floyd K. Richtmyer Memorial Lectureship Award, the Memory Ride Award for Alzheimer Research, and the Massachusetts Professor of the Year awarded by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. He has received five Doctorates Honoris Causa, from Bar-Ilan University, Eotvos Lorand University (Budapest), The University of Liege, The University of Dortmund, and The University of Wroclaw. Stanley has served as thesis advisor to 96 Ph.D. candidates at MIT and Boston University, and has worked with 106 research associates. With Nicole Ostrowsky, Stanley co-founded a series of NATO Advanced Study Institutes in interdisciplinary physics in Cargese (in 1985, 1988, and 1990), he co-directed the 1996, 2003, and 2009 Enrico Fermi Schools of Physics on Complex Systems, and he chaired the 1998 Gordon Conference on Water and the 1986 IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Mechanics, Statphys16. Stanley serves on the International Jury for the 500,000 euro “Women in Science” L’Oreal-UNESCO Prize. He is chair of the NAS/Keck Futures Initiative on Complexity, and is an active member of the NAS Committee Forefronts of Science at the Interface of Physical and Life Sciences, charged with finding ways for fostering useful collaborations between physicists and life scientists, He also serves on two NAS committees concerned with threat networks and threatened networks.

Departments or Divisions: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Science & Engineering

Affiliation: Primary & Affiliated Faculty

View all profiles