Rate My Professor Joshua Cohn

Joshua L. Cohn is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Senior Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami. He received his B.A. with honors in Physics from Wesleyan University in 1983 and his Ph.D. with distinction in Physics from the University of Michigan in 1989, with a doctoral thesis on low-temperature electronic transport in homogeneous and semicontinuous thin bismuth films advised by Professor Ctirad Uher. After serving as an Office of Naval Technology and American Society for Engineering Education Postdoctoral Fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory from 1989 to 1992, where he conducted research on transport properties of high-Tc cuprate superconductors, Cohn joined the University of Miami in 1992 as Assistant Professor in the Physics Department. He advanced to Associate Professor from 1998 to 2004, Professor from 2004 to 2010, Professor and Associate Chair from 2010 to 2013, and Professor and Chair from 2013 to 2021 before assuming his current administrative position in 2022.

Cohn's research focuses on low-temperature electronic, magnetic, thermal, and dielectric properties of correlated electron materials and low-dimensional systems, including transition-metal oxides and thin films. His expertise includes superconducting and magnetic oxides, with emphasis on electronic and thermal conduction, electron-lattice interactions, lattice-spin interactions, and phase behavior, as well as thermoelectrics involving electrical and thermal transport in semiconducting clathrates and skutterudites. He has published 79 refereed journal articles, achieving a Google Scholar h-index of 35 and over 6,100 citations. Notable publications include 'Semiconducting Ge clathrates: Promising candidates for thermoelectric applications' (1998), 'Glasslike heat conduction in high-mobility crystalline semiconductors' (1999), 'Giant Nernst Effect and Bipolarity in the Quasi-One-Dimensional Metal, Li_{0.9}Mo_6O_{17}' (2012), and 'Superconductivity at carrier density 10^17 cm^{-3} in quasi-one-dimensional Li_{0.9} Mo_6 O_{17}' (2023). His honors include the 2009 Outstanding Referee award from the American Physical Society, the 2011 Provost Research Award from the University of Miami, and the 1992 Knight Faculty Fellowship. Cohn co-organized the 1995 University of Miami Workshop on High-Temperature Superconductivity and has served on numerous departmental and university committees.