Rate My Professor Tim Halpin-Healy

Tim Halpin-Healy is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Physics and Department Chair of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College, Columbia University, a position he has held since advancing to the endowed chair in 2004. He joined the Barnard faculty in 1989 as Assistant Professor, becoming Associate Professor in 1994 and Full Professor in 1998. Halpin-Healy earned his A.B. cum laude in Physics from Princeton University in 1981, receiving the Kusaka Memorial Prize for excellence in independent research, and his Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 1987. His doctoral thesis, "Domain Wall Phases and Asymptotic Critical Wetting," was advised by Bert Halperin, Mehran Kardar, and Edouard Brézin. Prior to Barnard, he served as an ITP Postdoctoral Fellow in the Physics Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 1987 to 1989, and held a Predoctoral Fellowship at École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

His research specializes in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, encompassing phase transitions, critical phenomena, renormalization group methods, kinetic roughening, stochastic growth, directed polymers in random media, and the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class. Key publications include the seminal review "Kinetic Roughening Phenomena, Stochastic Growth, Directed Polymers & all that" with Y.-C. Zhang in Physics Reports 254, 215 (1995); "Dynamics of Multidimensional Secession: Fixed Points & Ideological Condensation," a cover article in Physical Review Letters 90, 258103 (2003); and "(2+1)-Dimensional Directed Polymer in a Random Medium: Scaling Phenomena and Universal Distributions" in Physical Review Letters 109, 170602 (2012). Halpin-Healy was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2018. He has received the Independent College Fund of New York Teaching Award in 1995 and a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Harvard-Danforth Center. Additionally, he co-directs the Barnard College Centennial Scholars Program, directs the Science & Public Policy Program, and has designed curricula for courses such as Electricity and Magnetism and Mechanics. His initiatives, funded by the National Science Foundation and Pew Charitable Trust, include mentoring student research and leading laboratory renovations at Barnard.