John Walter Clark


John Walter Clark, is Wayman Crow Professor of Physics emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis, and a recipient of the Eugene Feenberg Medal in 1987 for his contributions to many-body theory.

Biography

John Clark was born in 1935 in Lockhart, Texas. He received his BS and MA degrees in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1955 and 1957, respectively. He then earned his Ph.D. in Physics under the supervision of Eugene Feenberg at Washington University in St. Louis in 1959. He was a National [Science Foundation Network|National Science Foundation] Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University advised by Eugene Wigner and a NATO postdoctoral fellow at University of Birmingham and Saclay [Nuclear Research Centre|Saclay] from 1959 to 1963. He named his son Eugene after his advisors. Author is his daughter.
He became an assistant professor of physics in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis in 1963, was department chair from 2002 to 2007, and succeeded Edwin T. Jaynes as the Wayman Crow Professor of Physics.

Research and teaching

Clark is notable for his contributions to nuclear physics and many-body theory, Later in his career, he also turned his interests to neural nets. He taught "Physics of the Brain" for many years. He supervised over two dozen Ph.D. students and was notable for promoting women in the field.

Awards