Andrew Millis

Andrew Millis was educated at Harvard, Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He currently serves as Professor of Physics at Columbia University, and as the co-Director of the Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Simons foundation’s Flatiron Institute, where he is also Managing Director. Millis has made scientific contributions to a broad range of topics in correlated electron physics. Highlights include the basic theory of heavy fermion/Kondo lattice Systems and of equilibrium and nonequilibrium quantum criticality in metals. He has done foundational work on the optical and magnetic properties of high transition temperature superconductors and on the transport properties of molecular junctions. With Littlewood and Shraiman he established the basic physics of colossal magnetoresistance in manganese oxide materials. With Marianetti and Park he discovered a new type of metal-insulator transition and demonstrated its relevance to the rare earth nickel oxide materials. His pioneering work on Mott- insulator/band-insulator heterostructures helped establish the theoretical basis for this area of research. Millis’ development of the “hybridization expansion” with Werner and Troyer enabled the quantitative study of realistic models of correlated materials. With Werner he pioneered the extension of these methods to the nonequilibrium case. His discovery (with Werner) of “spin freezing” enabled the discovery of Hunds metals and his work with Gull has shown that the two-dimensional Hubbard model has the qualitative properties of copper-oxide high-Tc superconductors. His most recent work concerns nonequilibrium physics of driven systems. Working first with David Eisenbud and then with Yuri Tschinkel in the Mathematics and Physical Sciences Division of the Simons Foundation, Millis devised, launched and administered programs for large-scale philanthropic support of mathematics, theoretical computer science and theoretical physics and initiated program to foster the development of theory in the life sciences.

Millis is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the 2017 Hamburg Prize in Theoretical Physics.