
Walter Kohn
1945 UC
- 2012 Award Recipient
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Walter Kohn has made seminal contributions to understanding the electronic properties of materials. He did much of his notable work on semiconductors at Carnegie Mellon Univerity in Pittsburgh. Afterward, he moved to the University of California San Diego to serve as founding director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his leading role in developing density functional theory.