Name Gordon Semenoff | Education University of Alberta | |
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Gordon Walter Semenoff (born July 11, 1953), , , is a theoretical physicist and Professor of Physics at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is known for his research on quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and string theory and is particularly famous for his co-invention, together with Antti Niemi, of the parity anomaly in odd-dimensional gauge field theories and for his pioneering work on graphene. He is also well known for development of thermal field theory, the application of index theorems and their generalizations in quantum field theory and string theory, notably with respect to the duality between string theories and gauge field theories.
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Education and career
Gordon Semenoff was born on July 11, 1953 in Pincher Creek, Alberta, Canada where he attended Matthew Halton High School, graduating in the Class of 1971. After completing Bachelor of Science (1976) and Doctor of Philosophy (1981) Degrees at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Gordon spent one year, 1981–1982, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta and the subsequent year, 1982–1983, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Theoretical Physics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1983 he was appointed a University Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia and has spent the remainder of his career to date at that institution, being promoted to Full Professor in 1990. He has held a number of prestigious visiting appointments, including membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in 1984, 1985 and 2000, and visiting professorships at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland in 1986, Hokkaido University in Hokkaido, Japan in 1989, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1989, 1999 and 2012, Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden in 2000, the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, France in 2001 and 2011, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in Bures sur Yvette, France in 2005 and 2006, the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, U.K. in 2007 and 2012 and the University of Tours in Tours, France in 2008.