David Pines

David Pines (June 8, 1924 – May 3, 2018) was the founding director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) and the International Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (I2CAM) (respectively, United States-wide and international institutions dedicated to research in and the understanding of emergent phenomena), distinguished professor of physics, University of California, Davis, research professor of physics and professor emeritus of physics and electrical and computer engineering in the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), and a staff member in the office of the Materials, Physics, and Applications Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

His seminal contributions to the theory of many-body systems and to theoretical astrophysics were recognized by two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Feenberg Medal, the Edward A. Frieman Prize for Excellence in Graduate Student Research, Dirac and Drucker prizes, and by his election to the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences, and Hungarian Academy of Sciences and visiting professorships at the California Institute of Technology, College de France, Trinity College, Cambridge, University of Leiden, and the Université de Paris.

He was the founding director of the Center for Advanced Study, UIUC (1968–70), was vice-president of the Aspen Center for Physics from 1968 to 1972, founder and co-chair of the US-USSR Cooperative Program in Physics, 1968–89; and a co-founder, vice-president, chair of the board of trustees, and co-chair of the science board of the Santa Fe Institute, from 1982 to 1996.

He was the organizer or co-organizer of fifteen workshops and two summer schools of theoretical physics, was an honorary trustee and honorary member of the Aspen Center for Physics, and a member of the board of overseers at Sabancı University in Istanbul.