Steven Richardson (physicist)

Steven Leslie Richardson was born on 22 July 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, to Edward Alfred Richardson and Juanita Pearl Richardson. One of four children, he grew up in the Brevoort Houses.[3] Edward Richardson was a subway conductor and Juanita Richardson was a nurse. He attended Brooklyn Preparatory High School for his secondary education.[2]

He attended Columbia University for his undergraduate studies, and received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1975. He attended Columbia on a National Achievement Scholarship. Richardson subsequently earned a master's degree in 1981 and a PhD in 1983 from the Ohio State University, both degrees in theoretical condensed matter physics.[4] Richardson transferred to Ohio State from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with his graduate advisor, Bruce Patton.[5] Evelynn Hammonds, Sylvester James Gates and Reynold Verret were fellow students of Richardson's at MIT, and while there, Shirley Ann Jackson encouraged him to switch his concentration to condensed matter physics.[5] Before MIT, he had started his graduate studies at Wayne State University. While a student at Ohio State, he was a National Achievement Scholar.[6]

During his doctoral studies, Richardson held a position as an IBM Minority Graduate Fellow and a Xerox Graduate Fellow. While working at Xerox, he and his advisor discovered a new semiconductor surface for Gallium arsenide (GaAs).[2]

Following his doctoral studies, Richardson completed a Chancellor's Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, and was also a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.[2] At UC Berkeley he worked under Marvin L. Cohen. From 1986 to 1988, he worked as program director for the Condensed Matter Theory Program of the National Science Foundation and as a senior research scientist at the Eastman Kodak Company.[7]

He then joined the faculty of Howard University, serving as the associate director of the Materials Research Center for Excellence from 1989 to 1994. Concurrently, between 1989 and 1995 he was also an associate professor of electrical engineering at Howard. In 1995 he was promoted to full professor.[6]

Richardson has also served as a visiting professor and a visiting scientist at numerous universities throughout his career, including Iowa State University; Bradley University; the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal; Emory University; the Center for Computational Materials Science at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory; and was the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2016-2017.[8][1] He has been a member of numerous professional organizations including the American Physical Society, American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[2]

In 2022, he was a Faculty Associate in Applied Physics in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.[1]

• Career Advancement Award by the National Science Foundation (1992)[9]
• Howard University Faculty Senate Award for Exemplary Teaching (2013)[1]
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2022)[1]
• Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturers (2022-2023)[7]

Richardson's research has centered around computational materials science and computational chemistry, including the use of supercomputers to calculate the structural, electronic and vibrational properties of molecules. His work has been supported by funding from institutions including the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.[2]

• Video: Using Vector Calculus to Solve Problems in Electricity and Magnetism, Steven L. Richardson, Lec. 4