Jorge V. José

Life and career

José was born in Mexico City. He studied physics at the National University of Mexico. He finished his undergraduate degree in two and a half years, including an undergraduate thesis. He did his Ph.D. thesis under the advice of Leo P. Kadanoff at Brown University within a couple of years. Kadanoff hired him as a postdoctoral fellow thereafter during which time they wrote the ‘JKKN’ paper together with Scott Kirkpatrick and David Nelson. The paper provided a theoretical foundation and extensions of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) theory.

After Brown University he was at the University of Chicago (1977-1979) as the first James Frank fellow. At Rutgers University he was a Research Assistant Professor for a year in the group of Elihu Abrahams. He joined the Northeastern University faculty where he was promoted from Assistant (1980-84), Associate (1984-88) to Full professor (1988-1994). He was then the Mathews University Distinguished Professor (1996-2007). In 1995 he was the founder and director of the ‘Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Complex System’ (CIRCS) at Northeastern (1995-2015). From 2005-2010 he was the Vice President for Research of the ‘System University of New York’ at Buffalo and a professor of Physics and Biophysics. From 2010-2016 he was the System Vice President for Research of Indiana University, being a member of the Physics Department in Bloomington and of the Stark Neuroscience Institute plus Adjunct Professor of Cellular & Integrative Physiology, at Indiana University School of Medicine,in Indianapolis.

He has been a visiting Professor at: The Laue-Langevin Institute, Grenoble, France (1984-1985): The Saclay Nuclear Research Centre, Paris, (1985): The Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Utrecht, the Netherlands (1994-1995): The Salk Institute for Biological Sciences (2001, 2016).