Professor Jacek Furdyna

December 2006

How the Means Become the End in Scientific Discovery: the Impact of Unintended Consequences

Jacek Furdyna currently
holds the Marquez Endowed Chair in Information Theory and
Computer Technology at the University of Notre Dame. He obtained his
Ph.D. in experimental solid state physics at Northwestern University in
1960. After a period of postdoctoral research at Northwestern and MIT,
he joined the Physics Faculty of Purdue University in 1966, where he
remained until 1987. During the years 1982 to 1985 he served as Director
of the Materials Research Laboratory, a major multi-disciplinary program
sponsored by the National Science Foundation, focusing on research in
leading issues of materials science. In 1987 he was appointed to the
Marquez Endowed Chair of Information Theory and Computer Technology at
the University of Notre Dame. Throughout Prof. Furdyna’s career, his
research interests included spectroscopy of solids; fabrication and
investigation of man-made “designer” materials; semiconductor quantum
structures; short-wavelength optoelectronics and blue-green light
emitting devices (including blue lasers, of interest for achieving
high-density optical information storage); magnetic resonance; and most
recently the fabrication and studies of magnetic semiconductors, which
hold promise of entirely new forms of information processing (the
so-called “quantum computation”). He has over 600 publications in the
above fields. Jacek Furdyna is a member of Editorial Boards of
Semiconductor Science and Technology and Acta Physica Polonica. He has
served as a member on numerous advisory and/or program committees of
international conferences in areas of his specialty, most recently
dealing with the subject of spin effects in semiconductors and/or
semiconductor nanostructures. He is a Fellow of the American Physical
Society and of the Institute of Physics (UK). For his scientific
accomplishments, he was awar ded a doctorate honoris causa by Warsaw
University in 2002.