Christopher Jarzynski

Jarzynski received his A.B. (with high honors) in 1987 from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in 1994 from University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Władysław J. Świątecki and Robert Grayson Littlejohn.[1][4][6][7]

At University of California, Berkley, Jarzynski studied adiabatic invariants in chaotic classical systems. After graduating with a PhD, he spent ten years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and since 2006 he has been faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research is primarily in the area of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, where he has contributed to an understanding of how the laws of thermodynamics apply to nanoscale systems. In 1997, he derived an equality, now known as the Jarzynski equality, that relates nonequilibrium fluctuations to equilibrium free energy differences, a result that has been verified in numerous experiments and has found applications in biophysics and computational chemistry. His current interests also include the thermodynamics of information processing, as well as shortcuts to adiabaticity in quantum, classical and stochastic systems.

He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, and the 2019 Lars Onsager Prize.[8] He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[1][4][6] In 2020 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and Simons Fellowship.[3][9][10]

Jarzynski is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, and an associate editor of the Journal of Statistical Physics.[1][6]