Jorge V. José
Vice President for Research
Jorge V. José is the Vice President for Research and Professor of Physics at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York (UB). As Vice President he is responsible for university/industry relations, research funding and compliance, research communications and research support for UB. His administrative portfolio includes management of six (6) campus research centers, and the Office of Sponsored Program Services, the UB Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach (STOR), the Division of Comparative Medicine/Laboratory Animal Facility (DCM/LAF), and Institutional Review Boards responsible for both Human and Animal subjects. Dr. José and Dr. James Willis, Interim Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration, have recently established a new office to facilitate and expand the impact of UB?s research by merging pre and post-award services into one unit.
A native of Mexico City, Dr. José received his B.S., M.A., and Doctor of Science in Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He was trained as a theoretical condensed matter physicist and has done work in phase transitions, soliton physics, disordered systems, high temperature superconductivity, classical and quantum Josephson junction arrays, quantum and classical chaos, quantum phase transitions and more recently quantum computing. His recent research interests also cover areas of biological physics: He is studying problems of cell division in Xenopus extracts as well as neuroscience problems involving "Attention" and developing neuro-dynamic models to explain different swimming patterns of larvae Zebra Fish.
Following postdoctoral appointments at Brown University, the University of Chicago, and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at Northeastern University (NU) in Boston in 1981. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984 and full professor in 1988. He served as Interim Chair (2002-2004) and Chair (2004-05) of the physics department.
In 1977 he became the first James Frank Fellow at the James Frank Institute at the University of Chicago. In 1996 he was named the Matthews Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern. José was visiting Professor at the Institute Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France and at SACLAY in Paris. He spent sabbatical leaves at the Theoretical Physics Institute at Utrecht University, the Netherlands and at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, in La Jolla, CA. He has been a yearly visitor and faculty member of the Physics Institute at UNAM and was a Visiting Scholar for 13 years at the Centro Atómico Bariloche, in Argentina.
In 1995 he founded and directed the Center for the Interdisciplinary Research on Complex Systems at NU. José has received several awards including Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997 and Corresponding Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences in 1999. He was awarded the ?Chercheur Etranger D?haut niveau et de Renomme International? by the French Government, in 2002. He has held the Brody and the Eisen-Moshinsky Chairs at the Physics Institute of UNAM. He was the Klein Lecturer at Northeastern in 1993, and the Manuel Sandoval-Vallarta 2004 Award, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico.
José has been a member of the New England Board of Higher Education Minority Mentor Program for underrepresented students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
José is also interested in education and the diffusion of physics. He authored a graduate textbook (together with Professor E. Saletan (NU)) entitled "Classical Mechanics: A Contemporary Approach" (Cambridge University Press 1998, 2001, 2002, 2004), that includes many contemporary developments on the subject. The book is presently used as a graduate textbook in the United States, Europe, Korea, Japan, India and Asia.
José has served the community as a referee to Journals and grant proposals from the US (NSF, NIH, DOE, ONR), Europe and Latin American Countries. He was the Secretary/Treasurer of the International Physics Group (now Forum) of the American Physical Society from 1990-94. This group had made important contributions in organizing meetings and interactions between researchers in different countries.