01/17/08

    Edouard Brezin was born in Paris just before WWII to Polish refugees. Thanks to the help of several people, his family succeeded to escape the Nazis and became French in 1946. He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in 1961 and became a staff member of the Theory Department of the French Atomic Energy Commission in 1963. In 1974, he became Professor of Physics at the Ecole Polytechnique, keeping his research position at the AEC. In 1986, he joined Paris University and became Professor of Physics at the Ecole Normale Superieure, a small graduate school with highly selected students, where he chaired the Physics Department for five years from 1986 to1991. He is still a member of this department, but in addition, he has taken a number of additional duties. These include non-executive President of CNRS, the main French agency for basic research (1992-2000), President of the French Physical Society (2003-2004), and Vice-President and then President of the French Academy of Sciences (2003-2006). He is also a member of the Academia Europaea and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Society (UK). His work has been devoted to theoretical physics in the area of statistical physics, with the help of quantum field theory, with occasional encounters with particle physics or string theory. Married in 1960 to Colette, a biologist, they have two children and five grandchildren.

    Dr. Brezin has been awarded numerous prizes for his work including prizes from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the US. Indeed, he has been a visiting professor for a full semester or more at Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, Oxford, Kyoto University and many other prestigious institutions.