Institute For Advanced Study Announces Peter Goddard As New Director

The Institute for Advanced Study announced today that Peter Goddard will become its eighth Director as of January 1, 2004. Dr. Goddard, a mathematical physicist, is currently Master of St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge, where he also serves as a Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

“We are delighted to welcome Peter Goddard as the next Director of the Institute,” said James D. Wolfensohn, Chairman of the Institute’s Board of Trustees. “Peter brings a rare combination of abilities to his new position. He is a first-rate scholar who has made very significant contributions to his field, and he is also a first-rate administrator who has, over the course of many years, demonstrated his exceptional leadership abilities. As Master of St. John’s College, he has worked successfully in a variety of areas - implementing new initiatives, resolving complex issues, and creating long-range plans, to name just a few - with scholars from the sciences and humanities.”

Dr. Goddard’s research work is in the areas of string theory and conformal field theory, and in 1997 he was a winner, with David Olive, of the Dirac Prize and Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, which cited “their farsighted and highly influential contributions to theoretical physics, over an extended period. Goddard and Olive have contributed many crucial insights that shaped our emerging understanding of string theory and have also had a far-reaching impact on our understanding of four-dimensional field theory.”

During the course of his career, Dr. Goddard has also developed extensive skills as an administrator. He played a key role in the creation and establishment of The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, which opened in July 1992 after four years of careful preparation, and served as its first Deputy Director from 1991-1994. The Newton Institute runs research programs on selected themes in mathematics and the mathematical sciences with applications in a very wide range of science and technology.

Following his role as Deputy Director of The Newton Institute, Dr. Goddard led the planning and fundraising for the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge. This complex of seven new buildings re-housed the departments of mathematics and theoretical physics alongside the Newton Institute on a seven-acre campus. Together they constitute one of the world’s largest centers for research and teaching in the mathematical sciences.

Institute for Advanced Study Trustee Martin L. Leibowitz, Vice Chairman and Chief Investment Officer, TIAA-CREF, served as Chairman of the Search Committee that selected the new Director. Committee members were Professors Stephen L. Adler, School of Natural Sciences; Glen W. Bowersock, School of Historical Studies; Robert MacPherson, School of Mathematics; Joan Wallach Scott, School of Social Science; and Trustees Richard B. Black, Chairman, ECRM Incorporated; Vartan Gregorian, President, Carnegie Corporation of New York; Marie-Jos�e Kravis, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute; Nancy S. MacMillan, Publisher, Princeton Alumni Weekly; and Charles Simonyi, President and CEO, Intentional Software Corporation. Ex-officio members of the Committee were James D. Wolfensohn, President, The World Bank, and the late Leon Levy, Odyssey Partners.

Peter Goddard was born in England on September 3, 1945. He was educated at Emanuel School, London, and the University of Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and theoretical physics, and from which he received his B.A. degree, with First Class Honours, in 1966. After graduate work in mathematics and theoretical physics, he began research in theoretical elementary particle physics under the supervision of John Polkinghorne in 1967, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1971. Dr. Goddard later received an Sc.D. degree from Cambridge in 1996.

From 1969-1973, he was a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, with a leave of absence from 1970-1972 when he held a position as a Visiting Scientist at CERN, Geneva, where he began working with others on what became string theory, an attempt to formulate a unified theory of nature. This has been a central theme of Dr. Goddard’s subsequent work.

From 1972-1974, he was a Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Durham. In 1975, Dr. Goddard became University Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and Lecturer in Mathematics of St. John’s College, Cambridge. In 1976, Dr. Goddard began work with David Olive and others on magnetic monopoles and extended objects in field theories, and this has been another theme of his research. In 1980, they also began to try to elucidate the roles played by infinite dimensional algebras in theoretical physics, particularly string theory.

Dr. Goddard served as a Tutor of St. John's College from 1980-1987 and as Senior Tutor (responsible for the educational work of the College) from 1983-1987. In 1989, his contributions to theoretical physics were recognized by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society and his appointment as Reader in Mathematical Physics in the University of Cambridge, where a Professorship in Theoretical Physics was established for him in 1992.

In 1994, he became Master of St. John’s College. In addition to his research, teaching, and administrative responsibilities, he has taken a lead in developing projects that encourage the aspirations and accomplishments of school students in educationally deprived areas. He also servesas Chairman of the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate, which is responsible for school and other examinations both in the United Kingdom and in many other countries, and as Chairman of the Governing Body of Hills Road Sixth Form College, one of the leading sixth form colleges in the UK. Twice a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study - in the School of Natural Sciences in 1974 and in the Institute’s School of Mathematics in 1988 - Dr. Goddard has also held visiting positions at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, California; CERN, Geneva; the University of Virginia; the Institute for Theoretical Physics, the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay; Imperial College, London; and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, Bures-sur-Yvette, France.

Dr. Goddard is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, a Member and the current President of the London Mathematical Society, and a Fellow of both the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Arts. He has been a Senior Fellow, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge, since 1994, and an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, since 1995. In 2002, Dr. Goddard was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for his contributions to theoretical physics.

Dr. Goddard is the author of approximately 100 published papers. He served as editor of the publications of the Newton Institute, Cambridge University Press, from 1992-94, and continues to serve as editor of the Cambridge Lecture Notes in Physics, Cambridge University Press. He has also served as a member of the editorial boards of Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society; Nuclear Physics B; Physica D Nonlinear Phenomena; Journal of Physics; Proceedings of the Royal Society; and Nonlinearity.

Since its founding in 1930, the Institute for Advanced Study has played a unique role among academic institutions pursuing theoretical research. An independent, private institution whose academic membership, including permanent faculty, numbers about 200 at any given time, the Institute has been from the beginning a community of scholars whose primary purpose is the pursuit of advanced learning and scholarly exploration. The first two faculty members were Albert Einstein and Oswald Veblen, followed by such luminaries as John von Neumann, Kurt G�del, Robert Oppenheimer, and Freeman Dyson. The Institute’s commitment to its founding principle has yielded an unsurpassed record of definitive scholarship. Institute faculty and Members have received fifteen Nobel Prizes, and 31 out of 43 Fields Medalists, the Nobel equivalent for mathematicians, have been associated with the Institute.