Allan H. MacDonald

Who is Allan H. MacDonald?

Allan H. MacDonald is an theoretical condensed matter physicist and the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair Professor of Physics at The University of Texas at Austin. He completed a B.S. in physics at St. Francis Xavier University in 1973 and his Ph.D. at The University of Toronto in 1978. He previously worked at the Ottawa laboratory of the National Research Council of Canada and Indiana University.

MacDonald's area of interest is on how electron-electron interactions affect electronic properties in condensed matter systems. He previously worked on density functional theory and the Quantum Hall effect, and most recently has focused on the Spin Hall effect, magnetic insulators, magnetic semiconductors and spin-orbit interactions. His work has been cited more than 12,000 times, and he has a h-index of 69.

He received the Canadian Association of Physicists's Herzberg Medal in 1987, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and was elected to the National Academy of the Sciences in 2012.

His describes his own research as "driven, for the most part, by experiment rather than by theoretical technique".