Jerry Tersoff

Jerry Tersoff is a Research Staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He has worked in diverse areas relating to surfaces, interfaces, and materials physics. His current focus is materials issues in Quantum Computing. His research prior to Quantum includes theory of semiconductor nanowire growth; nanoscale effects in heteroepitaxy, including stress-driven formation of quantum dots; and the physics of carbon nanotube devices. His early work includes theories of scanning tunneling microscopy, Schottky barriers, and heterojunction band lineups. He also developed model interatomic potentials that are widely used in materials simulations.

His work has been recognized by the Von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society, the Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society, the Medard Welch Award of the American Vacuum Society, and the MRS Medal.  Within IBM he received a solo Outstanding Research Accomplishment, later upgraded to Extraordinary. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the APS, AVS, and MRS. According to Google Scholar, his papers have been cited over 70,000 times, with an h-index of 106, and he is first author of 12 papers cited over 1000 times each. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society (2003-2005) and on the Editorial Board of Journal of Applied Physics and Applied Physics Letters (2001-2003). He received his B.A. in Physics from Swarthmore College, and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley.