John S. Wettlaufer

John S. Wettlaufer is an American physicist and applied mathematician. He is the A. M. Bateman Professor of Geophysics, Mathematics, and Physics at Yale University, in the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Mathematics and Physics. He is also research professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) and Stockholm University. He has been a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics since 2021.

Education Wettlaufer received a B.S. with Honors in mathematics and physics from the University of Puget Sound in 1985, and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1991. His dissertation, The Directional Solidification of Salt Water, was supervised by Norbert Untersteiner, J. Gregory Dash, and Michael Schick.

Career Wettlaufer's primary appointment has been at Yale University since 2002, with concurrent affiliations at the University of Oxford from 2010 to 2018 and at Nordita and Stockholm University since 2014.

From 1991 to 2001, Wettlaufer held postdoctoral and faculty positions at the University of Washington, with appointments in the Department of Physics and at the Applied Physics Laboratory, and took part in field measurements on Arctic pack ice. He moved to Yale University in 2002 as professor of geophysics and physics and fellow of Silliman College. In 2008 he was elected the A. M. Bateman Professor of Geophysics, with joint appointments as professor of mathematics and professor of physics. His Nordita and Stockholm appointment, established through an international recruitment funded by the Swedish Research Council, began in November 2014. the 1996 Physical Review Letters paper on premelting dynamics for arbitrary power-law forces, the 2001 Nature paper on the climate signal in ancient ice, the 2004 Journal of Fluid Mechanics paper on frost heaving, and 2006 reviews with Dash and Rempel in Reviews of Modern Physics and with Worster in the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. Related work concerns convection in mushy layers.

Ice and climate Wettlaufer's work on ice and climate includes a 1997 Journal of Fluid Mechanics paper modeling brine rejection from sea ice in the framework of mushy layer theory, a 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper on threshold behavior in Arctic sea ice loss, and a 2015 Physical Review Letters paper on the sea-ice thickness distribution. In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, Wettlaufer and Woosok Moon introduced the framework of coupling functions in climate.

Statistical mechanics and mathematical physics Wettlaufer has developed a general stochastic perturbation theory for non-autonomous systems, and asymptotic methods for solving the Fokker–Planck equations for the survival analysis of non-autonomous Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes and non-adiabatic stochastic resonance. He has used these and similar approaches to study the thermodynamics of information, the prediction of rare events, the maritime Casimir effect, and non-Markovian first-passage dynamics.

Soft matter and surface stresses Wettlaufer's work on capillarity in soft elastic solids includes a 2013 Nature Communications paper on the deformation of soft substrates near a contact line, and a 2015 Nature Physics paper on capillary stiffening of soft solids by liquid inclusions.

Stochastic methods, geophysics, and astrophysics Wettlaufer has developed stochastic methods for time series analysis, non-Gaussian stochastic models of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, Arctic sea ice stability, paleoclimatology, and the detection of exoplanets and stellar spectral features.

Hydrodynamics and geophysical fluid dynamics Wettlaufer demonstrated a variational principle for compositional convection during solidification, he has developed an asymptotic framework for wind wave generation and mushy layer convection, theoretical models for jet-stream waviness and the Hadley circulation, and the heat transport scaling laws in turbulent Rayleigh–Bénard convection.

Books Wettlaufer co-edited the volume Ice Physics and the Natural Environment (NATO ASI Series, Springer, 1999) with J. G. Dash and N. Untersteiner.

Honors SIAM fellow (2023) OCCAM visiting fellow, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford (2010) At Yale he is the director of undergraduate studies for applied mathematics. He has been a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics since 2021.

Selected publications