Princeton Physicist Garners Dirac Medal

John J. Hopfield, a professor of computational neurobiology and biophysics at Princeton University, was awarded the Dirac Medal on 8 August by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. With the award, the ICTP has recognized, for the first time, the very different mode of theory that is necessary for making the connection between physics and biology.

Each year on 8 August, ICTP commemorates the birthday of physicist and Nobel Prize winner P. A. M. Dirac by presenting the medal in recognition of significant contributions to theoretical physics and mathematics. This year’s medal acknowledges Hopfield’s “important contributions in an impressively broad spectrum of scientific subjects.” The ICTP points out that his “special and rare gift is his ability to cross the interdisciplinary boundary to discover new questions and propose answers that uncover the conceptual structure behind the experimental facts.”

Hopfield’s achievements include the Hopfield model of neural processing, which demonstrates how computation is qualitatively different in a computer compared with that in the brain and relates some of the brain’s “neural algorithms” to the mathematics of magnetic systems. More recently, according to the ICTP, “he has found an entirely different [collective] organizing principle in olfaction and demonstrated a new principle in which neural function can take advantage of the temporal structure of the ‘spiking’ interneural communication.”

In addition to the medal, Hopfield received a prize of $5000.