Professor Jerry Gollub has received one of the most prestigious awards in physics, the 2003 Fluid Dynamics Prize of the American Physical Society (APS). The award will be presented at a ceremony on Nov. 23, 2003. He is the only winner in the history of the prize to hail from a liberal arts college.

The Fluid Dynamics Prize is one of a number of prizes awarded annually in different areas of physics by the APS. Established in 1979, the prize recognizes and encourages outstanding achievement in fluid dynamics research. The prize consists of a certificate and a cash award.

The APS cited Gollub for“his elucidation of chaos, instabilities, mixing and pattern formation in various contexts including fluid convection, and his contribution to our understanding of surface waves, film and granular flows, all through his clever experiments, lucid papers, and lively lectures.” Twenty-four Haverford students, from the class of 1975 to the class of 2003, collaborated on the work the prize recognizes.

This is not Gollub's first award from the APS; he was the first recipient of the Society's Award for Research in an Undergraduate Institution in 1985. He has also held Danforth, Woodrow Wilson, and Guggenheim Fellowships. He became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992 and, the following year, was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, where he is the only physicist from an undergraduate institution.

A member of Haverford's faculty since 1970, Gollub received his undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, in 1966 from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics from Harvard University in 1971. He has performed a wide range of experiments on nonlinear and non-equilibrium phenomena, including studies of instabilities and pattern formation in fluids, chaotic dynamics and turbulence, nonlinear waves, patterns formed at the surface of growing crystals, the dynamics of granular materials, and mixing in fluids. He has co-authored a textbook on chaotic dynamics, and is a member of the graduate groups in physics and mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.