Donald Q. Lamb

Donald Q. Lamb is the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago (UChicago). He was Chair of the Department from 1988 to 1991. He is Director of UChicago’s Flash Center for Computational Science.

Lamb received his B.S. (1967, Physics and Mathematics) and M.S. (1969, Physics) at the University of Liverpool. He received his Ph.D. (1974, Physics) at the University of Rochester. Lamb’s research has covered a wide range of topics in high-energy astrophysics, including the properties of cold and hot dense matter; the structure and evolution of white dwarfs and neutron stars; X-ray emission from compact stars, especially magnetic white dwarfs; and the physics of radiation transfer in super-strong magnetic fields.

Lamb has received the American Physical Society’s 2019 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. He was named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2017.