Prof. Issac Silvera, Professor of Physics and the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University.

Prof. Silvera received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and then after a postdoctoral year in Grenoble, France, worked at the North American Aviation Science Center in Southern California, studying superconductivity and solid molecular hydrogen. In 1971 he accepted a professorship in the physics department at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. During his eleven years in Holland, he started research to produce metallic hydrogen, and succeeded in producing a gas of atomic hydrogen, spin-polarized hydrogen. This was the first stable Bose gas that started the effort to produce Bose-Einstein condensation, now a major field in physics. In 1982 he accepted a professorship at Harvard University where he now teaches and leads a research group focused on low temperature and high-pressure physics. He and his students and postdoctoral fellows have studied solid hydrogen to extreme pressures. Recently, culminating a 45-year effort, they achieved the highest pressure ever on solid hydrogen, 4.9 million atmospheres, and transformed hydrogen into a metal. Solid metallic hydrogen was predicted 81 years ago by Wigner and Huntington and has been the ultimate goal in high-pressure research. Metallic hydrogen may be a room-temperature superconductor, among other important properties. Professor Silvera has published almost 300 papers, mostly on hydrogen. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a foreign member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. He received a White House appointment from President Obama to the Board of the Vietnam Education Foundation in 2011 and served as Chairman