Farid F. Abraham

Farid F. Abraham (born May 5, 1937) is an American scientist.

By pioneering new methods of using computer modeling in research, Abraham has made seminal contributions to science in the fields of fracture mechanics, membrane dynamics and phase transformation behavior of matter. He has authored two textbooks and over 200 papers published in international journals, including several cover articles including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature. He won the Aneesur Rahman Prize in Computational Physics, which is the highest prize given by the American Physical Society. Abraham is a native of Phoenix Arizona and received both his B.S. (1959) and Ph.D. (1962) degrees in physics from the University of Arizona. He spent two postdoctoral years (1962-63) at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and two years as a research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. He joined IBM in 1966 as a staff member at its Palo Alto Scientific Center. In 1971, Abraham was named the first Consulting Professor at Stanford University and developed a graduate course in computational applied science in the Materials Science Department. In 1972, he moved to the IBM Research Division's San Jose Research Laboratory, known since 1985 as the Almaden Research Center. During 1994, Abraham held the Sandoval Vallarta Chair at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. For the period of 1995 to 2003, he was awarded several computer grants at the National Science Foundation Computational Centers and Department of Defence Grand Challenge Grants at the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC). He has been awarded several IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards. Abraham is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and, in 1998/99, was an American Physical Society Centennial Speaker. Abraham was the Chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Computational Physics in 2000-2001. He was elected the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Senior Scientists. In March of 2004, he received the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society. Retiring from IBM in 2004, he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Senior Scientist and was named the Graham-Perdue Visiting Professor at The University of Georgia. In 2010, he retired from LLNL. For over four decades Abraham has pursued a wide range of computational physics applications, mainly in condensed matter physics and chemical physics.

Bibliography

Abraham, Farid F., and Tiller, William A. (1972) An Introduction to Computer Simulation in Applied Science. New York: Plenum Press.

Abraham, Farid F. (1974) Homogeneous Nucleation Theory, New York: Academic Press

Abraham, Farid F. (1979) “On the Structure, Thermodynamics and Phase Stability of the Nonuniform Fluid State,” Physics Reports. 53, 93

Abraham, Farid F. (1981) “The Phases of Two-Dimensional Matter, Their Transitions & Solid-State Stability,” Physics.Reports. 80, 339

Abraham, Farid. F. (1986) “Computational Statistical Mechanics: Methodology, Applications and Supercomputing,” Advances In Physics. 35, 1

Abraham, Farid F. & Nelson, David R. (1990) “Diffraction from Polymerized Membranes,” Science. 249, 393

Abraham, Farid F. and Kardar, M. (1991) "Folding and unbinding transitions in tethered membranes." Science 252, 419

Abraham, Farid. F. et al. (2003) "How fast can cracks move? A research adventure in materials failure using millions of atoms and big computers". Advances In Physics. 52, 727

Abraham, Farid. F. et al. (2003) "How fast can cracks move? A research adventure in materials failure using millions of atoms and big computers". Advances In Physics. 52, 727

Abraham, Farid F. et al. (2002) "Simulating materials failure by using up to one billion atoms and the world’s fastest computer". Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 99, 5777.

Abraham, Farid F. et al. (2000) "Dynamically spanning the length scales from the quantum to the continuum". International Journal of Modern Physics. C11 (6), 1135 Abraham, Farid F. et al. (1998) "Spanning the length scales in dynamic simulation". Computers In Physics. 12, 538

Abraham, Farid F. (1997) "Portrait of a Crack: Rapid Fracture Mechanics Using Parallel Molecular Dynamics.” IEEE Computational Science & Engineering. 4, 2

Pitera JW, Swope WC, and Abraham FF (2008), “Observation of Non-cooperative Folding Thermodynamics in Simulations of 1BBL,” Biophysical Journal 94, 4837

Abraham, Farid F. and Duchaineau M. A., (2011) “Compaction Dynamics of Metallic Nano-foams,” arXiv:1202.4650