Ronald Cohen received a B.S., Geology in 1979 from Indiana University and a Ph. D. in Geology from Harvard University in 1985. He was a National Research Council Cooperative Research Associate in 1985-1987 at the Naval Research Laboratory and a Research Physicist at NRL from 1987-1990. He has been a Research Geophysicist at the Geophysical Laboratory since 1990. He was Visiting Professor of Materials Science and Geophysics 2000-2001 at the California Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America. He received the Doornbos Memorial Prize from International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth’s Interior (IASPEI) in 1994 and the Mineralogical Society of America Award in 1994. His primary interests are in the study of materials from first principles including the properties of materials under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature with applications to problems in geophysics. Also of major interest are the properties and underlying physics of ferroelectrics. He has authored over 178 papers and edited books and special issues in Ferroelectrics.

He edited the special report High-Performance Computing Requirements for the Computational Solid Earth Sciences in 2005. He was Chair of the AGU Mineral and Rock Physics Committee, 2004-2006, and member of the committee 1993-1997 and 2003-present. He has run a workshop on Fundamental Physics of Ferroelectrics every two years since 1990, co-organized workshops at the Aspen Center for Physics, the Summer School on Quantum Monte Carlo from Minerals and Materials to Molecules at UIUC in 2007, and other workshops on computational geosciences and mineral physics.

Publications

Mehl, M.J., R.E. Cohen, and H. Krakauer, LAPW electronic structure calculations for MgO and CaO, Journal of Geophysical Research 93, 8009 (1988); 94, 1977 (1989).

Cohen, R.E., Elasticity and equation of state of MgSiO3 perovskite, Geophysical Research Letters 14, 1053 (1987).

Isaak, D.G., R.E. Cohen, and M.J. Mehl, Calculated Elastic and Thermal Properties of MgO at High Pressure and Temperatures, Geophys. Res. 95, 7055 (1990).

Cohen,R.E.,Ferroelectricity origins, Nature 362, 213 (1993).

Caracas, R. and R.E. Cohen, Theoretical determination of the Raman spectra of MgSiO3 perovskite and post-perovskite at high pressure, GRL, 33, (2006).

Sha, X. and R.E. Cohen, Thermal effects on lattice strain in epsilon-Fe under pressure, Phys. Rev. B, 74, 064103 (2006).

Cohen, R.E., Relaxors go critical, Nature 441, 941 (2006).

Papandrew, A. B., M. S. Lucas, R. Stevens, I. Halevy, and B. Fultz, M. Y. Hu and P. Chow, R. E. Cohen and M. Somayazulu, Absence of magnetism in Hcp iron-nickel at 11 K, Phys. Rev. Lett, 97, 087202 (2006).

Sha, X. and R. E. Cohen, First-principles thermoelasticity of bcc iron under pressure, Phys. Rev. B 74(21): 214111-6 (2006).

Caracas, R. and R.E. Cohen, Effect of chemistry on the physical properties of perovskite and post-perovskite, Ed. J. Brodholt, AGU, in press. (2007).