Christopher Jarzynski

Christopher Jarzynski is an American physicist and a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland, where he holds appointments in the department of chemistry and biochemistry, the department of physics and the institute for physical science and technology. He is known for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. In 1997 he derived the Jarzynski equality, which 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. The Nobel Committee for Physics cited confirmation of the equality as an application of optical tweezers, one of the inventions honoured in 2018. He earned his A.B. in physics at Princeton University in 1987 and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1994, spent ten years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and has been on the Maryland faculty since 2006. He received the 2019 Lars Onsager Prize and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.