Kohn, Walter

Kohn, Walter (1923–  ) physicist; born in Vienna, Austria. He escaped the Nazis and emigrated to England (1939), then Canada (1940). He came to Harvard in 1946, taught there (1948–50), then moved to the Carnegie-Mellon Institute (1950–60), where he contributed to the theory of electronic structure of metals. He joined the University of California: San Diego (1960–79), and continued his work on the physics of solids. He directed Santa Barbara's Institute for Theoretical Physics (1979–84), then became a physics professor at the University of California: Santa Barbara (1984).