Farid Abraham

Education

Abraham is a native of Phoenix, Arizona and received both his Bachelor of Surgery (1959) and Doctor of Philosophy (1962) degrees in physics from the University of Arizona.

Career

He has pioneered new methods of using computer modeling in the fields of fracture mechanics, membrane dynamics and phase transformation behavior of matter. He has written two textbooks and over 200 papers published in international journals. He spent two postdoctoral years (1962-1963) at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and two years as a research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

He joined International Business Machines Corporation in 1966 as a staff member at its Palo Alto Scientific Center.

In 1971, he was named the first Consulting Professor at Stanford University and developed a graduate course in computational applied science in its Materials Science Department. In 1972, he moved to the International Business Machines Corporation Research Division"s San Jose Research Laboratory, known since 1985 as the Almaden Research Center.

During 1994, he held the Sandoval Vallarta Chair at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. Foreign the period of 1995 to 2003, he was awarded several computer grants at the National Science Foundation Computational Centers and Department of Defence Grand Challenge Grants at the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC).

He has been awarded several International Business Machines Corporation Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and, in 1998/99, was an American Physical Society Centennial Speaker. He was the Chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Computational Physics in 2000-2001. He was elected the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Senior Scientists.

Retiring from International Business Machines Corporation in 2004, he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Senior Scientist and was named the Graham-Perdue Visiting Professor at The University of Georgia.

In 2010, he retired from LLNL. Foreign over four decades he has pursued a wide range of computational physics applications, mainly in condensed matter physics and chemical physics.

Achievements

• He won the Aneesur Rahman Prize in Computational Physics, which is the highest prize given by the American Physical Society. In March 2004, he received the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society.