Trent University alumnus and current Killam Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Ian Affleck was recently elected a fellow of the Royal Society for 2010.

Dr. Affleck, who graduated from Trent in 1975 with a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics, was one of 44 new fellows announced by the Royal Society in 2010. As a fellow, he joins the ranks of the UK and Commonwealth’s leading scientists as the Society celebrates its 350th anniversary.

The Fellowship of the Royal Society is composed of 1,300 of the most distinguished scientists from the United Kingdom, other Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland. Fellows of the Royal Society are elected for life.

Dr. Affleck was selected due to his numerous ground-breaking contributions across a wide range of theoretical physics.His early work on dynamical supersymmetry breaking and the Affleck-Dine mechanism for baryogenesis had strong impact on particle physics. In mathematical physics, he contributed to important rigorous results on valence-bond groundstates in antiferromagnets. He has also authored many seminal works in condensed matter theory applying field theoretic methods to systems of experimental relevance.