| AdminHistory | David Thouless was born in Scotland in 1934. He was educated at Winchester College in Hampshire, and went on to study natural sciences at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. He undertook his doctoral research at Cornell University in New York, researching the problem of nuclear matter in relation to the many-body problem. He worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California in Berkeley, before taking up the role of Director of Physics at Churchill College, Cambridge in 1961. In 1965 he moved to the University of Birmingham as their professor of mathermatical physics until 1978. He then moved to the United States where he was briefly at Yale in 1979 before becoming Professor of Physics at the University of Washington from 1980.
Thouless retired in 2003, though he continued to publish research papers for a number of years after this. In his later years he suffered from dementia, and in 2016 he returned to the UK with his wife to assist with his care. His research interests included the many-body problem, superconductivity, and topological ordering in statistical mechanics. His work on topological phase transitions and phases of matter led to him recieving the 2016 Nobel Prize for physics along with Frederick Duncan Michael Haldane and John Michael Kosterlitz. |