Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: A view of Dave's scientific career over the past four decades offers a breathtaking landscape characterized by remarkable diversity of scientific interest, pioneering achievements, and admiration and affection from his colleagues.The models and methods that Dave has introduced, while tackling complex problems in a variety of fields, have been original and forwardthinking, engendering a series of novel theoretical and computational methods now widely used to address complex problems in physics, chemistry, and biology.His ability to simplify a challenging problem, extracting its essence through his intuition and imagination, has impressed and truly impacted those of us fortunate enough to work with him.Dave has mentored tens of postdocs and students from North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, many of whom are now working as faculty members in academia, and collaborated with many scientists around the world.Dave received his undergraduate degree in 1977 from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur.Moving from India to the US, Dave did his Ph.D. under the supervision of Donald Truhlar at University of Minnesota, in theoretical chemistry focusing on problems in quantum scattering.He received his Ph.D. in 1982, and moved to Columbia University, where he joined Bruce Berne's group as a postdoctoral researcher.Dave would tell us the story of his first meeting with Bruce Berne.His initial intent was to work on some issues involving the liquid-vapor interface.However, Bruce asked Dave to look at the landscape of the Hudson River across his office window, saying, "I want you to have a broader perspective about science."Dave ended up working on developing the quantum Monte Carlo method.The review article that appeared in Annual Reviews of Physical Chemistry, written by Dave and Bruce, is now regarded as a classic paper in that field.Dave spent three years at Columbia.He told us stories of coffee breaks at Columbia, baseball games at Yankee stadium, and, of course, the NBA.The 1980s was the time when the importance of statistical physics was recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physics.Chemical physics was enjoying its heyday.Spin-glass models were gaining more traction.Soft matter physics was growing rapidly.In his late 20s, Dave became an assistant professor at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology (IPST) at the University of Maryland at College Park and was affiliated with the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department.He was fearless in exploring many different areas of cutting-edge science, developing a style reflecting his scientific heroes, including Bob Zwanzig, Michael E. Fisher, Paul Flory, Phil Anderson, and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes.It is remarkable to see how different and original each paper he wrote during this period is.The subjects include polymer dynamics in porous materials, topologically entangled polymers, liquid crystals, polymerinduced drag reduction in turbulent flows, and some problems in condensed matter physics.With Ray Mountain and Ted Kirkpatrick, Dave devised the so-called "ergodic measure" to study supercooled liquids, assessing whether a system exhibits broken ergodicity and, if not, quantifying the minimum time required to reach equilibrium.The "ergodic measure" is used widely to analyze not only molecular dynamics simulations of liquids, glasses, and biophysical systems, but also seismic data.It is presented as a fundamental computational technique in
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4200066524