Early life and education Gerald Dennis Mahan was born in
Portland, Oregon in 1937. Mahan graduated valedictorian from
Franklin High School. He studied physics at
Harvard University and graduated
magna cum laude in 1959. In 1964, under
John Hopfield at the
University of California, Berkeley he received his PhD in physics for explaining linear dispersion in excitations.
Career Upon graduation he became a research scientist at
General Electric Research Laboratory (1963–1967). He worked full-time for General Electric (GE) until 1967 and then spent another 28 years working for them part-time, one of the longest part time continuous relationships in GE research history. In 1967, Mahan became a professor of physics at the
University of Oregon. While at Oregon he continued his work on the x-ray edge and expanded it to include surface science and the microscopic theory of dielectrics. He was awarded a
Sloan Research Fellowship from the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and spent 1970 working at the
Cavendish Laboratory of
Cambridge University, England. Mahan became a professor at
Indiana University in 1973. During his tenure at Indiana, he was invited by Stig Lundqvist of
Chalmers University and the
Niels Bohr Institute to spend a sabbatical year working at Chalmers in
Gothenburg, Sweden. This fostered a long collaboration with Chalmers and Swedish physics. In 1984 the
University of Tennessee and
Oak Ridge National Laboratory created a joint Distinguished Scientist program to raise the quality and profile of science in Tennessee. Mahan was recruited as the first member of that program and moved to Tennessee. He continued his research but spent much of his time as a research manager. During
Lamar Alexander's tenure as President of the University of Tennessee, he recruited Mahan to teach freshman physics, which he did for ten years. At that time, there were not many members of the
National Academy of Science teaching freshman physics. In 2001, Mahan was recruited to join the faculty of
Pennsylvania State University as a distinguished professor. He expanded his areas of expertise to include thermoelectrics and thermal transport systems in nanotubes. He retired from Penn State in 2016 and served as an adjunct professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2016 until 2020. Later in his career, Mahan served as a leader of scientific organizations both in the United States and globally. He served as a general councilor (board of directors) of the
American Physical Society. He served as secretary (head) of Section III of the
National Academy of Science. Section III includes Applied Math, Computer Science, Engineering and Applied Physical Science. He also served as secretary of Section 33 (Applied Physical Science). He served as the first chairman of the International Centre for Condensed Matter Physics (ICCMP) in
Brasília, Brazil. In his role as chairman of ICCMP he traveled relentlessly to foster collaboration between South American and US and European physicists. == Work ==