John Walter Clark

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 an National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University advised by Eugene Wigner and a NATO postdoctoral fellow at University of Birmingham and Saclay from 1959 to 1963.[2] He named his son Eugene after his advisors.[3] Author Mathilde Walter Clark is his daughter.

He became an assistant professor of physics at Washington University in 1963, was interim department chair from 1996–1997, and succeeded Edwin T. Jaynes as the Wayman Crow Professor of Physics.[4]

Clark is notable for his contributions to nuclear physics and many-body theory, but later in his career 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.[3]

• Fellow, American Physical Society
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1965)
• Eugene Feenberg Medal for Many-Body Physics (1987)
• Wayman Crow Professorship in Physics (1999)