David Ceperley

Ceperley's pioneering work on the development and application of the path integral Monte Carlo method for quantum many-body systems, such as superfluid helium and hydrogen under extreme conditions has been recognised by several organisations including Fellow of the American Physical Society (1992), the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal for many-body physics (1994), the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics of the American Physical Society (1998), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999) and elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences (2005). He became the Founder Professor of Engineering (2006), a Center for Advanced Studies Professor (2009) and a Blue Waters Professor (2014) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was awarded the Berni Alder prize by CECAM (Lausanne, Switzerland) in 2016.

Richard Martin and Ceperley started the annual workshop series, Recent Developments in Electronic Structure Methods in 1989. Ceperley has also been an organiser of Summer Schools in Computational Materials Science. Videos of Ceperley's lectures on Quantum Monte Carlo methods can be found on YouTube.

Ceperley was married to Perine Davis (1950–2015); they have three children.

David Matthew Ceperley (born 1949) is a theoretical physicist in the physics department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or UIUC. He is a world expert in the area of Quantum Monte Carlo computations, a method of calculation that is generally recognised to provide accurate quantitative results for many-body problems described by quantum mechanics.

Ceperley was born in Charleston, West Virginia USA in 1949, and attended George Washington High School there. He was a student at Atlantic College in Wales UK, received a BS degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1971 and a PhD in theoretical physics at Cornell University in 1976. His advisors were Geoffrey Chester at Cornell University and Malvin Kalos at the Courant Institute at New York University. He had postdoctoral appointments in Orsay, France, New York University and Rutgers University, where he worked with Joel Lebowitz on the simulation of polymers. He was a staff scientist at the National Resource for Computational Chemistry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1978 to 1987. Since 1987, he has been a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a staff member at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications from 1987 to 2012. In his development as a leading mathematical and computational physicist Ceperley had a number of acknowledged mentors, many of whom happen to be his former supervisors such as Geoffrey Chester, Malvin Kalos, Joel Lebowitz and Berni Alder. At UIUC he has been influenced by the physics Nobel Laureates Anthony Leggett and John Bardeen.