John W. Wilkins, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of Physics Emeritus at The Ohio State University passed away on December 6, 2019 in Columbus, Ohio.

Born on March 11, 1936 in Des Moines, Iowa, he obtained a BS in Engineering at Northwestern University in 1959 and PhD in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1963. John was a student of J. Robert Schrieffer.

After an NSF postdoc at Cambridge University, Wilkins was appointed assistant professor at Cornell University in 1964. He left Cornell as professor of physics in 1988 to become an Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor of physics at Ohio State University.

In his 53-year career in condensed matter theory, John had 45 PhD students, 59 postdocs, and 12 faculty visitors, and with students and colleagues published 303 papers.  His knowledge spanned diverse areas including many body systems, the renormalization group, electronic structure, surfaces, magnetism, excitation phenomena, and transport properties.

When recently asked of his most significant accomplishment in physics, John responded “my students and postdocs”.

Wilkins was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Sloan and Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. John played a leading role in the American Physical Society, becoming Chair of the Division of Condensed Matter Physics in 2003-2004. He also served as a Councilor, editor, and reviewer (lifetime award as an Outstanding Referee) for the American Physical Society and was a visitor for the Department of Energy, national and company laboratories, and many universities in the US and Europe. His service in these roles was invariably tireless, highly perceptive and singularly effective, to the enduring benefit of the world-wide physics community.

John was well known for his straightforward and direct approach, humor and interdisciplinary research. At Cornell he enthusiastically supported students and postdocs, not only his own, and encouraged theorists to work with experimentalists. As one example of his broad range of interests, he collaborated with Ken Wilson and his students to extend the Renormalization Group to solve the Anderson impurity problem and to address correlated electron systems.

As Ohio Eminent Scholar, John worked with OSU leadership to enhance investment in research, presided over the growth of the condensed matter group, and built strong ties between Physics and other departments. His commitment to interdisciplinary research paved the way for the Center for Emergent Materials, an NSF-MRSEC. He helped move the Ohio State library into the digital age, supported growth of the Ohio Supercomputer Center, and played a pivotal role in recruiting several senior hires including Ken Wilson.

In addition to his U.S. teaching and research, he made a long-term commitment to the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) to establish a solid state physics program. John made many extended visits to the Bohr and Oersted Institutes in Copenhagen and Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. There were many exchanges of professors, postdocs and students from Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Four of us (Herbst, Kukkonen, Smith and Lundqvist) participated in these exchanges which benefited our careers and led to many friendships and collaborations. John also made extended visits to the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB in Santa Barbara, California.

Professor John Wilkins left substantial bequests to both Ohio State University and Cornell University. At Cornell, two postdoctoral fellowships--one theoretical and one experimental--will be endowed through his bequest and matching funds. There will be a John W. Wilkins endowed professorship at Ohio State.