David R. Nelson (born September 5, 1951, Stuttgart) is an American physicist, and Arthur K. Solomon Professor of Biophysics, at Harvard University.
Education and research
Nelson graduated from Cornell University Summa cum laude in 1972, with a MS in 1974, and with a Ph.D. in 1975. He was in the fourth and final class of Cornell's short-lived "Six-year Ph.D. program". Since 1978 he has been a professor at Harvard University.
His research is in the field of condensed matter. Together with Bertrand Halperin, he has established the theory of dislocation-mediated melting in two dimensions.
1984 MacArthur Fellows Program2004 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize1995 Harvard Ledlie Prize of Harvard University1993–1994 Guggenheim Fellowship 1986 Award for Initiatives in Research from the National Academy of Sciences1979–1983 AP Sloan FellowshipD.R. Nelson and J.M. Kosterlitz, "Universal Jump in the Superfluid Density of Two-Dimensional Superfluids" Phys. Rev. Lett.. 39: 1201 (1977).D.R. Nelson and B.I. Halperin, "Dislocation-mediated melting in two dimensions." Phys. Rev. B 19: 2457 (1979).D.R. Nelson, "Order frustration and defects in liquids and glasses." Phys. Rev. B 28: 5515 (1983).D.R. Nelson and L. Peliti, "Fluctuations in membranes with crystalline and hexatic order." Journal de Physique 48: 1085 (1987).D.R. Nelson, "Vortex entanglement in high temperature superconductors." Phys. Rev. Lett. 60: 1973 (1988).D.R. Nelson and V. Vinokur, "Boson localization and correlated pinning of superconducting vortex arrays." Phys. Rev. B 48: 13060 (1993).N. Hatano and D.R. Nelson, "Vortex pinning and non-Hermitian quantum mechanics." Phys. Rev. B 56: 8651 (1997).D.R. Nelson and N. Shnerb, "Non-Hermitian localization and population biology." Phys. Rev. E 58: 1383 (1998).D. Lubensky and D.R. Nelson, "Single molecule statistics and the polynucleotide unzipping transition," Phys. Rev. E 65, 03917 (2002).
