Prize Recipient

Mark Newman
University of Michigan

"For fundamental contributions to the statistical physics of complex networks."

Mark Newman received his undergraduate degree in physics in 1988 and Ph.D. in physics in 1991, both from the University of Oxford, then conducted postdoctoral research at Cornell University before taking a position at the Santa Fe Institute, a think-tank in New Mexico devoted to the study of complex systems. In 2002 he moved to the University of Michigan, where he is currently the Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics and a professor in the university's Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Professor Newman is known for his pioneering work on applications of methods of statistical physics to the interdisciplinary study of networked systems, such as technological and social networks. Particularly notable are his work on random graph models of network structure, community detection, mixing patterns in networks, spectral methods and random matrix theory, the stochastic block model and inference methods, message passing and belief propagation, the small-world effect, network epidemiology, and applications to a wide range of practical problems spanning physics, computer science, biology, ecology, and the social sciences. Among other honors, Professor Newman is a Fellow of the APS and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been a Simon's Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow and was winner of the ISI Lagrange Prize in 2014 and the Network Science Society's Euler Prize in 2021.