Lu Jeu Sham

Dr. Sham was born in Hong Kong, graduated from Puiching Middle School, Kowloon in 1955; 1957 General Certificate of Education at Portsmouth College of Technology, England; 1960 B.Sc. in Mathematics at Imperial College, University of London; 1963 Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Theory at the University of Cambridge. He did postdoctoral research on Condensed Matter Theory during 1963-1966 at UCSD; Assistance Professor of physics at University of California Irvine 1966-67; Reader in Mathematics at Queen Mary College, London 1967-68; returned to UCSD as an Associate Professor of Physics in 1968. Dr. Sham?s thesis work included computations with an early electronic computer of the electron-phonon interaction and the phonon dispersions. Walter Kohn, Pierre Hohenberg, and Lu Sham laid down the foundation of the density functional theory for numerical computation of electronic properties of atom, molecules, and solids, a method widely used to date. Together with the work on the electrons in heterostructures of semiconductors, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Science and Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and Fellows of American Physical Society, Optical Society of America, and AAAS.