Matthew P. A. Fisher

Matthew P. A. Fisher is an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is known for several major contributions to condensed matter physics. He completed his bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1981 and earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986 with Anthony Leggett as his advisor, with part of his work done under the supervision of Eduardo Fradkin. He went on to become first a visiting scientist and then a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (1986–1993). He joined the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of the University of California in 1993. In 2007 he joined Microsoft's Station Q as a research physicist, on leave from the UCSB physics department. During the academic year 2009–2010 he was on the faculty at Caltech, returning to the physics department at UCSB in summer 2010.

He was awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award in 1995, and in 2015 he was a recipient of the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize for his work on the superconductor-insulator transition. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.^[1] He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.^[2]

He is the son of English physicist Michael E. Fisher, and brother of American physicist Daniel S. Fisher.