Malcolm R. Beasley

Biosketch

Malcolm (Mac) Beasley received his Bachelor of Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 1962 and his PhD in Physics, also from Cornell, in 1967. He then went to Harvard University where, after a year as post-doctoral researcher, he joined the faculty in the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics. In 1974 he moved to Stanford University, where later he became the Sidney and Theodore Rosenberg Professor of Applied Physics. While at Stanford, Beasley served as chair of the Department of Applied Physics, led the effort to establish the new multidisciplinary Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials, and served as the dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. Beasley is a Past President of the American Physical Society and an Honorary Trustee of Associated Universities, Inc. Beasley has received the Dean?s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford and was honored to deliver the Loeb Lecture in Physics at Harvard and the James Clerk Maxwell Lecture at the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Research Interests

Beasley's research interests have focused primarily on basic and applied superconductivity with occasional forays into other areas, most notably nonlinear dynamics and transport at short length scales in amorphous semiconductors. He is best known for his work on resistance in superconductors and the associated phase slippage process, and in the properties of superconductors in two dimensional and layered systems, including recognition that the Kosterlitz-Thouless theory of two-dimensional phase transitions applies to superconducting thin film, contrary to the then prevailing view, and that the transition temperature of disordered thin films are strongly depressed due to enhance Coulomb repulsion in Cooper pair formation. He is also known for his work on the physics and applications of Josephson junctions and SQUID devices, most notably the development of the first SQUID magnetometer capable of measurements in high magnetic fields, and of high resistance superconductor/normal metal/superconductor (SNS) Josephson junctions that are now the basis for the 10V programable voltage standard at NIST. Beasley has also had a long-standing interest in fluctuation effects in superconductors and in particular their role in fundamentally limiting possible high temperature superconductivity.