Rudolf Podgornik

R. Podgornik, photo courtesy Sara Cohen (2009).

Rudolf Podgornik (born August 27, 1955 in Ljubljana, Slovenia) is a physicist. His fields of research are: physics of soft matter, physics of coulomb fluids and macromolecular interactions, the Lifshitz theory of van der Waals dispersion interaction and the Casimir effect, physics of membranes, polymers and polyelectrolytes and especially the physics of DNA and viruses.

Career

Podgornik and coworkers discovered the line hexatic phase in the phase diagram of the concentrated long fragment DNA solutions . The line hexatic mesophase appears to be the preferred packing form of long DNA in bacteriophages. He is the author of more than two hundred scientific papers and a coeditor of books: "Electrostatic Effects in Soft Matter" (Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, Les Houches, France, 1–13 October 2000, Series: NATO Science Series II: Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, Vol. 46 ), together with Christian Holm and Patrick Kekicheff and "Electrostatics of Soft and Disordered Matter" (Pan Stanford Publishing, March 31, 2014) with David S. Dean, Jure Dobnikar and Ali Naji. Together with D. Harries, J. DeRouchey, H. H. Strey, and V. A. Parsegian, he coauthored the chapter "Interactions in Macromolecular Complexes Used as Nonviral Vectors for Gene Delivery", in the leading textbook of gene therapy: "Gene Therapy: Therapeutic Mechanisms and Strategies" , N. Smyth – Templeton, Marcel Dekker, New York (2008), Third Edition.

Rudolf Podgornik is the head of the research program Biophysics of polymers, membranes, gels, colloids and cells, financially supported by the Slovene Agency for Research and Development (ARRS) . He is a member of the Theoretical Physics Department at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, and until 2010 he was an adjunct researcher at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. He is a professor of physics at the Physics Department , Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana and a professor of biophysics at the Medical Faculty, University of Ljubljana. Since 2011 he is also adjunct professor at the Physics Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and since 2013 an adjunct professor at the Materials Science & Engineering Department at the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. He is a coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Biological Physics, edited by Springer.

Awards

In 1986-1989 he was awarded the Fogarty fellowship, at the Laboratory of Structural Biology, DCRT, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda. In 1995 he was awarded the Division of computer research and technology Director's award for "recognition and appreciation of special achievement" (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda). In 1999 he was awarded the Zois Award, which is the highest prize for scientific excellence in Slovenia . In 2002 he was awarded the "CNRS Chercheur Associe fellowship" at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides - UMR 8502 Universite Paris Sud 11. In 2008 he was a co-recipient of the Martin Hirschorn IAC Prize, made possible by the generosity of Martin Hirschorn, given once every two years and funded by the INCE Foundation. In 2016/2017 he was awarded the Sackler Scholar award and became a Nirit and Michael Shaoul Fellow, within the framework of the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

External links

• Rudolf Podgornik research page at Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana
• Rudolf Podgornik at the official Faculty of mathematics and physics, University in Ljubljana site. (Slovene)
• Rudolf Podgornik research page at UMass in Amherst
• Rudolf Podgornik research page at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland
• Polymer Physics: DNA off the Hooke Article published by Nature in November 2006
• Rudolf Podgornik associated articles at arXiv.org
• Rudolf Podgornik at Researchgate
• Rudolf Podgornik at Google Scholar