Farid F. Abraham

Farid F. Abraham (born May 5, 1937) is an American scientist. He has pioneered new methods of using computer modeling in the fields of fracture mechanics, membrane dynamics and phase transformation behavior of matter. He has written two textbooks and over 200 papers published in international journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature. He won the Aneesur Rahman Prize in Computational Physics, which is the highest prize given by the American Physical Society.

Abraham is a native of Phoenix Arizona and received both his B.S. (1959) and Ph.D. (1962) degrees in physics from the University of Arizona. He spent two postdoctoral years (1962-63) at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and two years as a research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California.  He joined IBM in 1966 as a staff member at its Palo Alto Scientific Center. In 1971, Abraham was named the first Consulting Professor at Stanford University and developed a graduate course in computational applied science in the Materials Science Department. In 1972, he moved to the IBM Research Division's San Jose Research Laboratory, known since 1985 as the Almaden Research Center. During 1994, Abraham held the Sandoval Vallarta Chair at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. For the period of 1995 to 2003, he was awarded several computer grants at the National Science Foundation Computational Centers and Department of Defence Grand Challenge Grants at the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC). He has been awarded several IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards. Abraham is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and, in 1998/99, was an American Physical Society Centennial Speaker. Abraham was the Chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Computational Physics in 2000-2001. He was elected the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Senior Scientists. In March of 2004, he received the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society. Retiring from IBM in 2004, he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Senior Scientist and was named the Graham-Perdue Visiting Professor at The University of Georgia. In 2010, he retired from LLNL. For over four decades Abraham has pursued a wide range of computational physics applications, mainly in condensed matter physics and chemical physics.

Abraham's early interests in nucleation phenomena led him to pioneer the use of Monte Carlo computational methods in the study of microscopic liquid droplets and the liquid-vapor interface. Prior to his work, a molecular understanding of these inhomogeneous fluid states did not exist. His computer simulation studies in the early 1970s resolved an outstanding controversy concerning the pretransition state at the onset of vapor condensation which is presented in his advanced text on nucleation entitled Homogeneous Nucleation Theory [1].

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