William NewmanMensa member
UCLA Professor
Dr. Newman earned 4 degrees in different areas of theoretical physics and astrophysics, beginning in Canada and culminating at Cornell working in highenergy astrophysics as well as planetary physics. The latter led to a collaboration with Carl Sagan that thrived until Carl died prematurely in 1996. After Cornell, he was a member for two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked in theoretical astrophysics with Freeman Dyson and others. He then joined the faculty at UCLA in 1980, where he taught in 3 departments, published over 100 peer-reviewed research papers and 2 graduate textbooks, and supervised 10 Ph.D. dissertations. He became a collaborator at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1980, a role that ended in 2015 as the laboratory moved away from performing basic science. He held the Stanislaw Ulam Distinguished Scholar appointment at LANL in 1990-91 and returned to UCLA as a full Professor. He held other sabbatical appointments around the globe as a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, including the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Cornell, etc., and then returned to the Institute for Advanced Study in 2018-19 as a fellow of the IBM Einstein Foundation, where he continues to collaborate on problems in general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics. He has served the broader scientific community by being elected to the executive committees of both the American Physical Society’s Topical Group on the Physics of Climate and the American Astronomical Society’s Division on Dynamical Astronomy.