Malcolm Beasley is President of the American Physical Society. Beasley received his Bachelor of Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 1962 and his PhD in Physics, also from Cornell, in 1967. He then went to Harvard University where, after a year as post-doctoral researcher, he joined the faculty in the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, achieving the rank of Associate Professor before moving to Stanford University in 1974. Later, he was appointed the Sidney and Theodore Rosenberg Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford. While at Stanford, Beasley led the effort to establish the new multidisciplinary Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials and served as the Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. He became an emeritus professor in 2010 but continues his research activities.
Beasley is presently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Associated Universities, Inc, a non-profit corporation that provides oversight of various scientific facilities on behalf of federal funding agencies, most notably the NSF-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is responsible for the North American part of the construction (and soon the operation) of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. He also presently serves on the Program Committee of the Millennium Science Initiative of the Ministry of the Economy in Chile. Earlier, he was Chair of the DARPA Defense Sciences Research Council and served as Chair of the committee to investigate the possibility of scientific misconduct in the work of Hendrik Schön of Bell Laboratories and his coauthors. In addition, Beasley was one of the co-founders of a start-up company created to exploit the promise of high temperature superconductivity and has served several scientific advisory boards, including the Institute of Theoretical Physics (now the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Oversight Committee of the School of Applied Science at Harvard, and currently the Advisory Committee of the Casimir Institute jointly created by the Delft University of Technology and Leiden University.
Beasley has received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford and has been a Loeb Lecturer in Physics at Harvard and a James Clerk Maxwell Lecturer at the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.