Introduction
Christopher Jarzynski is an American physicist and Distinguished University Professor at University of Maryland's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Department of Physics, and Institute for Physical Science and Technology. He is known for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, for which he was awarded the 2019 Lars Onsager Prize. In 1997, he derived the now famous Jarzynski equality, confirmation of which was cited by the Nobel Committee for Physics as an application of one of the winning inventions of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics—optical tweezers.
Education
Jarzynski received his A.B. (with high honors) in 1987 from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in 1994 from University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Władysław J. Świątecki and Robert Grayson Littlejohn.
Awards and honours
He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, and the 2019 Lars Onsager Prize. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Jarzynski is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, and an associate editor of the Journal of Statistical Physics.