John Hopfield became vice president of the American Physical Society for 2005, succeeding John Bahcall (see Physics Today, December 2003, page 80). Hopfield took office on 1 January and will automatically become president-elect in 2006 and president in 2007. Marvin L. Cohen serves as the society’s president for 2005 (see Physics Today, November 2002, page 88).
Hopfield’s parents met as graduate students in physics at the University of California, Berkeley; he carried on the family study of physics by earning a PhD from Cornell University in 1958. In his thesis, he formulated a field-theoretic description of the interaction of light with excitons in solids. After completing his studies at Cornell, he joined the theoretical group at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs for two years, then began his teaching career at Berkeley in 1961.
In 1964 Hopfield became a professor of physics at Princeton University, where he continued...
