University of Minnesota

Peter Dowben is a Charles Bessey Professor of Physics at the University of Nebraska (UNL). From 1984-1990 he was Assistant Professor of Physics at Syracuse University, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1990. He moved to the University of Nebraska in 1993 and was promoted to Professor of Physics in 1995, Research Professor of Chemistry in 1994, becoming a Charles Bessey Professor 2002. He performed his post-doctoral research as a scientific staff member at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, Germany under Professor Michael Grunze. He received this Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Cambridge, under the direction of Dr. Lionel Clarke. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a Fellow of the American Vacuum Society, twice recipient of UNL’s Engineering and Technology Multidisciplinary Research Award. Peter Dowben has pioneered resonant photoemission as a means of investigating metallicity, demonstrating the surface nonmetal to metal transition [1,2], and pioneered angle resolved XPS for the study of boundary segregation [3]. He has discovered or demonstrated many novel surface effects including the surface ferroelectric transition [4,5], and together with Christian Binek, demonstrated boundary magnetization in magneto-electrics [6,7] and contributing to advances in voltage controlled devices [8,9]. He has published over 500 papers, several books and 15 patents with over 9000 citations and has an h-index of 43.