Andrei Ruckenstein, PhD
ARROWS Internal Advisory Board Member
Andrei Ruckenstein, PhD
Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics
Boston University
Dr. Andrei Ruckenstein is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics at Boston University. Andrei served as Vice President and Associate Provost for Research at Boston University from June, 2007 to July 1, 2013. He received his PhD in Physics from Cornell, was a member of the Theoretical Physics group at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and held faculty positions in Physics at the University of California, San Diego, and Rutgers University. At Rutgers he was the founding Director of BioMaPS, a University-wide initiative focused on interdisciplinary research in Biology at the Interface with the Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and the first Director of the associated BioMaPS Graduate Program. He also served as Director of the Superconductivity Summer School at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, and as President of the Aspen Center for Physics where he was elected as an honorary life-time trustee. He is the co-founder of the Aspen Science Center, a non-profit organization promoting K-12 science education and the public understanding of science. He was also the Chair of the Executive Committee and the founding President of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, Inc., a collaboration between Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, UMass, the State of Massachusetts, and Cisco and EMC. Currently he serves on the Executive Committee and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation, and as a member of Big Data Organizing Committee for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He currently serves as the Chair of the Strategy and Budget Committee of the Board of CASIS, a Congress designated not-for-profit which manages the research and entrepreneurial activities on the International Space Station National Laboratory, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.
Andrei is a theoretical condensed matter physicist by training, whose research interests focused primarily on the study of collective effects in atomic gases at low temperature, and the physics of strongly correlated many-body systems, with application to low dimensional semiconductors, heavy fermions, and non-Fermi liquid behavior and superconductivity of the oxide high temperature superconductors. A decade ago his research direction shifted from theoretical condensed matter physics to Biological Physics, an area that would be more appropriately described as “Biology from a Physicist’s Perspective”. His biology research has been concerned with understanding the mechanisms governing the behavior of RNA polymerase, the molecular motor that transcribes the genetic information encoded in DNA into RNA. He is the recipient of a Sloan Fellowship, an ONR Young Investigator Award, and a Senior Humboldt Prize, and he is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.