The Materials Research Society (MRS) has named Lu Sham, University of California, San Diego, as the recipient of the 2019 Materials Theory Award “for pioneering contributions to the quantum theory of molecules and solids, especially the Kohn–Sham formulation of density functional theory.” Sham will be recognized at the 2019 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston. The Materials Theory Award, endowed by Toh-Ming Lu and Gwo-Ching Wang, “recognizes exceptional advances made by materials theory to the fundamental understanding of the structure and behavior of materials.”

Sham is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is a condensed-matter theorist, working on electron and phonon properties and quantum optical processes in semiconductor nanostructures and ferromagnets. Sham is an early practitioner of first-principles computations of lattice vibration spectra and density functional theory (DFT). His recent interests involve quantum information and spintronics.

Sham is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), The Optical Society and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He served as a chair of the Semiconductor Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, as a member of the Council and of the Executive Board of APS, and on the Executive Committee of its Division of Condensed Matter Physics. He received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Imperial College London and his PhD degree in physics from the University of Cambridge.

The title of his talk Tuesday evening, December 3, is “Quantum Aspect of the Density Functional Theory.” The Kohn–Sham equation is a subterfuge from the classical nature of the DFT. Sham will give a brief description of modification of DFT to treat entanglement and to apply it to quantum phase transitions.