Frederick Duncan Michael Haldane

Professor Frederick Duncan Michael Haldane is a theoretical physicist born in 1951 in Great Britain to his father, Scott Haldane, and his mother, Carinthian Slovene Ljudmila Renko. According to his ethnicity, he says that he is half Scottish and half Slovene.

Professor Duncan Haldane received his doctorate in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1978, where his mentor was Nobel Laureate P. W. Anderson. Until 1981, he then worked at the Laue-Langevin Institute in Grenoble, from 1981 to 1987 at the University of Southern California, and then between 1987 and 1992 at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1990, he accepted a professorship at Princeton University, where he still works today.

In addition to family ties, he is also connected with Slovenia by professional connections with Slovenian physicists. In 2000, he was an invited lecturer at a conference on theoretical physics in Bled, organized by the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Ljubljana and the Jožef Stefan Institute. In 2018, he paid an extended visit to Ljubljana, where he gave two extremely well- attended lectures, as part of Stefan’s days at the Jožef Stefan Institute, and a lecture for physics students at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. In December last year, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Ljubljana.

Duncan Haldane’s originality as a scientist has an outstanding reputation among physicists globally, as evidenced by numerous accolades in the world even before the Nobel Prize. In 1993, he received the Oliver E. Buckley Award from the American Physical Society for Condensed Matter. In 1992 he was appointed a fellow of the American Academy of Sciences and Arts and, in 1996, a fellow of the Royal Society of London (FRS). In 2012, he also received the Dirac Medal from the Abdus Salam Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste.

Experimental proof of Haldane’s theoretical predictions led the Swedish Academy of Sciences to decide to award him, along with colleagues David J. Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz, the 2016 Nobel Prize for “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological states of matter”.

In 2017, he received the award of the Slovenian-American Educational Foundation ASEF for his life’s work, and in 2019 he also became a Slovenian citizen.