Beate Schmittmann


Beate Schmittmann is a German condensed matter physicist and academic administrator who works at Iowa State University as dean of the Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Her research includes work on driven diffusive systems, biomolecular transport, and epidemiology.

Education and career

Schmittmann earned a diploma in physics in 1981 from RWTH Aachen University, and completed a Ph.D. in 1984 at the University of Edinburgh. Her dissertation was jointly supervised by David Wallace and A. D. Bruce.
After working as a researcher and then assistant professor at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, she moved to the US in 1991, to become an associate professor of physics at Virginia Tech. She was promoted to full professor in 1997, and served as department chair from 2006 until 2012, when she moved to Iowa State as dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, replacing retired former dean Michael Whiteford and interim dean David Oliver.

Book

Schmittmann is the coauthor with Royce King-Ping Zia of the book Statistical Mechanics of Driven Diffusive Systems.

Recognition

Schmittmann was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2004, after a nomination from the APS Topical Group on Statistical & Nonlinear Physics, for "seminal and sustained research on fundamental and applied problems in non-equilibrium statistical physics, in particular driven diffusive systems". In 2010, the Southeastern Section of the APS gave her their for research excellence.
She became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015 for "seminal and sustained research on fundamental and applied problems in nonequilibrium statistical physics, and for contributions to administration and to increasing diversity in STEM".