Eugene Chudnovsky

Who is Eugene Chudnovsky?

Eugene Michael Chudnovsky is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York and a member of the doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate School. Chudnovsky is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, elected 1993 for "seminal contributions to random ferromagnetism, macroscopic quantum tunneling, and hexatic order in high Tc materials". He is mostly known for his work on quantum tunneling of magnetization. Chudnovsky explained magnetic avalanches experimentally observed in molecular magnets as deflagration.

Chudnovsky received his undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral education at Kharkov University in Ukraine, in a school of theoretical physics built by Lev Landau and his students. The denial by USSR of exit visa to Chudnovsky in 1979 led to his unemployment for eight years during which he continued independent research in theoretical physics and participated in the unofficial Refusenik Science Seminar in Moscow. He was frequently harassed and interrogated by the KGB.

In 1987 Chudnovsky was allowed to emigrate and joined the faculty of the Physics Department of Tufts University in Boston. The following year he moved to the City University of New York. He has held visiting positions at research centers in the USA, Asia, and Europe—most notably at the University of Barcelona - Spain, where he co-organizes Annual International Workshop on Magnetism and Superconductivity.