Michael Cohen

Michael Cohen is an American condensed matter physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. His work investigates the quantum mechanics of real-world material systems, including liquid helium, ferroelectrics, and biological membranes. In 1960, the American Physical Society appointed him a Fellow. In 1962, with colleagues George Stranahan and Robert W. Craig, Cohen co-founded the Aspen Center for Physics (ACP), described as a "utopia for physicists," for which he remains an Honorary Trustee. In 2011, Cohen completed a textbook entitled, Classical Mechanics: a Critical Introduction, in collaboration with fellow physicist Larry Gladney, who prepared the solutions manual.[1]

Cohen earned his Bachelor of Science degree at Cornell University in 1951. Under the supervision of Richard Feynman, with whom he published papers on the physics of liquid helium, Cohen earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1956. Cohen held postdoctoral positions at Caltech and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton before joining the faculty in the department of physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Among the Ph.D. candidates whom Cohen supervised is the physicist Mark G. Kuzyk.

In 1962, Cohen worked with colleagues George Stranahan and Robert W. Craig to establish and raise funds for the Aspen Center for Physics to foster collaborative research among physicists from different sub-fields, independent of any one university or institution. Together they generated initial support from the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Needmor Fund to finance the center's first building. A historical retrospective of the ACP, written upon its fiftieth anniversary, suggested that Cohen's role in the center's establishment was that he "found the talent" – that is, drew in the physicists – for its early scientific programs.