About

John S. Wettlaufer is the A.M. Bateman Professor of Geophysics, Mathematics and Physics at Yale University, and Professor of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Nordita and Stockholm University. He has been on the physics faculty at the University of Washington and in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. His training is in the statistical physics of phase transitions but over the years it has branched out substantially across many disciplines in soft condensed matter physics and applied mathematics with impinging upon biophysics, geophysics and astrophysics.

He develops and harnesses approaches and methods from modern applied mathematics, non-equilibrium statistical physics, experiments and numerical simulations to probe a broad range of problems from the microscopic theory of melting to the mechanisms underlying cosmogony and the mathematics of stochastic processes and their applications.  He is inspired by natural phenomena with a particular interest in phase changes, fluid dynamics and moving boundary problems, with a penchant for asymptotic methods.

He began his affiliation with Nordita as a Visiting Professor at Nordita in 2008 and again in the fall of 2011 supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and was awarded the Tage Erlander Guest Professorship for 2012, supported by the Swedish Research Council.