Donald Q. Lamb

Don Q. Lamb received a B.S. in Physics from Rice University in 1967, an M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Liverpool in 1969, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Rochester in 1974. He has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago since 1985, where he is the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, and a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Harris School of Public Policy.

His research interests have included the properties of matter at high densities and temperatures, the evolution of white dwarfs and neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and most recently, experiments that use intense lasers to study the origin of the magnetic fields in the universe. He played a key role in founding the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and was the co-leader and Mission Scientist for the NASA High Energy Transient Explorer mission from 1990-2005. He was director of the Flash Center for Computational Science from 2003-2018.

Lamb has held leadership roles in several scientific organizations. He was on the Board of Trustees of the Aspen Center for Physics from 1981-1986; a member of the Executive Committee of the Astrophysics Division of the American Physical Society from 1982-1984; vice-chair, chair, and past-chair of the Executive Committee of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society from 1979-1984; and a member of the Executive Committee of the National Ignition Facility Users Group from 2012-2018, serving as its Chair from 2013-2016 and Past Chair from 2016-2018.

He has advised the DOE defense laboratories. He served on the Nonproliferation and International Security and the Intelligence and Space Research divisional review committees at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2000-2006; was co-chair of the Integrated Modeling Panel, Science of Fusion Ignition on NIF Workshop in 2012; and chaired the 2016 High Energy Density Plasmas/Physics and Fluids Capability Review at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2016. He has served on the Los Alamos National Laboratory-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Predictive Science Panel since 2018.

Lamb has long been active in science policy. He served on several advisory committees of the National Academy of Sciences. He was a member and then vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from 1993-2003; and a member and then chair of the Space Science Working Group of the American Association of Universities from 1997-2005. He was the convener of the Science Policy Committee for the 2008 Obama Presidential Campaign and a member of the transition team for President-Elect Obama. He served on the Physics Policy Committee of the American Physical Society from 2017-2019. He is currently a member of the Panel on Public Affairs of the American Physical Society, serving as Vice Chair in 2022, Chair-Elect in 2023 Chair in 2024 and Past Chair in 2025.

He was awarded a George C. Marshall Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and the American Physical Society 2019 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Institute of Physics (UK); and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.