Malcolm Beasley

Candidate for Vice President

Biographical Summary
Malcolm Beasley received his Bachelor of Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 1962 and his PhD in Physics, also from Cornell, in 1967.  He then went to Harvard University where, after a year as post-doctoral researcher, he joined the faculty in the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, achieving the rank of Associate Professor before moving to Stanford University in 1974.  Later, he was appointed the Sidney and Theodore Rosenberg Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford.  While at Stanford, Beasley led the effort to establish the new multidisciplinary Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials and served as the Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences.  He became an emeritus professor in 2010 but continues his research activities.  

Beasley is presently the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Associated Universities, Inc, a non-profit corporation that provides oversight of various scientific facilities on behalf of federal funding agencies, most notably the NSF-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is responsible for the North American part of the construction (and soon the operation) of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.  He also presently serves on the Program Committee of the Millennium Science Initiative of the Ministry of the Economy in Chile.  Earlier, he was Chair of the DARPA Defense Sciences Research Council and served as Chair of the committee to investigate the possibility of scientific misconduct in the work of Hendrik Schön of Bell Laboratories and his coauthors.  In addition, Beasley was one of the co-founders of a start-up company created to exploit the promise of high temperature superconductivity and has served several scientific advisory boards, including the Institute of Theoretical Physics (now the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Oversight Committee of the School of Applied Science at Harvard, and currently the Advisory Committee of the Casimir Institute jointly created by the Delft University of Technology and Leiden University.

Beasley has received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford and has been a Loeb Lecturer in Physics at Harvard and a James Clerk Maxwell Lecturer at the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London.  He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Research Career
My research interests have primarily focused on superconductivity with occasional   forays into other areas.   The early part of my career involved the first development of practical SQUID magnetometers and their use to study the magnetic properties of superconductors.   The importance of dimensionality on the properties of superconductors became clear at that time and led naturally to my work with Luther and Klemm on the theory of the upper critical magnetic field in quasi-two-dimensional superconductors, which remains of interest to this day.  More importantly, perhaps, these developments led me to see the importance of new materials in the physics of superconductivity going forward, and when I went to Stanford, I joined forces with Ted Geballe to form one of the earliest university-based materials physics groups in the US.  Later, this group became the wryly-named KGB group when Aharon Kapitulnik came to Stanford.  The work for which I am probably best known is the recognition that the Kosterlitz-Thouless-Berezinskii theory of two-dimensional phase transitions effectively applies to superconductors.  The extensions of this insight by others to the understanding of two-dimensional and quasi-two-dimensional superconductors, most notably the vortex phases of the high temperature cuprate superconductors, were beyond my imagination.  In addition, my interest in the applications of Josephson junctions led me in the early days of the modern renaissance in non-linear dynamics into a study of the mutual synchronization of coupled Josephson junction oscillators and the discovery of novel phase-locked splay states under some conditions that, unknown to me at the time, had a large impact in the applied mathematics community.  My current research is focused on the search for new and better higher temperature superconductors.

Candidate's Statement
My interest in serving as an officer of the APS is simple.  Physics has been good to me and it is time to serve the community.  In addition, I think that my past experiences would be useful in this regard.  Also, I firmly believe that healthy fields of science require effective leadership institutions that serve and enable the field well, if the field is to remain healthy and vibrant.  Historically, the APS has done an exemplary job in fulfilling this role and continues to do so.  But the changes facing science these days are so profound and so rapid that a special effort is required.  As an officer of the APS, I would work to bring the best talent among us to address these issues and adapt wisely.  More specifically, we need to continue to tend to the financial health of physics by informing Congress and the public at large of the role that physics plays and can yet play in the nation's security and economic future, but also its cultural heritage.  While not a business, we need to run the affairs of the APS in a business like way.  We need to continue to adapt in the manner by which our journals and scientific meetings perform their traditional communication roles.  We need to understand and enable effective international collaborations, particularly in the area of large facilities.   We need to encourage careers in physics for all demographic elements of our society for the richness it would bring us and as under tapped reservoirs of human talent. 

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