A. Alan Middleton

A. Alan Middleton
CitizenshipAmerican
EducationPrinceton University
Cambridge University
Harvey Mudd College
Known forDisordered Materials
Biham–Middleton–Levine traffic model
AwardsAPS Fellow (2010)
AAAS Fellow (2016)
Scientific career
WorkplacesSyracuse University
ThesisCritical and qualitative behavior of sliding charge density waves (1990)
Daniel S. Fisher
Other academic advisors
M. Cristina Marchetti
Websiteaamiddle.expressions.syr.edu

Arthur Alan Middleton is a professor of physics and the associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University. He is known for his work in the fields of disordered materials such as random magnets, spin glasses, and interfaces in a random environment, transport in disordered materials, interface motion, and colloidal assemblies, condensed matter physics, statistical physics, and computational physics, connections between algorithm dynamics, computer science analyses, algorithms for efficient simulation of complex dynamics, including heuristic coarse graining for glassy materials.

Education

Middleton earned his bachelor's in mathematics and physics with distinction at Harvey Mudd College in 1984. He received Churchill Scholarship and moved to Cambridge University where he earned a certificate of advanced study. He also received the NSF-GRFP grant from the National Science Foundation in 1984. Middleton joined Princeton University in 1986 and earned a PhD in physics in October 1990.

Career

The Biham–Middleton–Levine traffic model, named after Ofer Biham, Middleton, and Dov Levine

From 1990 to 1992 Middleton was a research associate in the physics department at Syracuse University. From 1992 to 1994 he was a visiting scientist at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.

He joined the Department of Physics at Syracuse in 1995 as an assistant professor and became a full professor in 2008. He was director of undergraduate studies in physics from 2000 to 2007 and associate chair of the department from 2009 to 2013. He chaired the department from 2013 to 2017.

Middleton was named associate dean for research and scholarship of the College of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and held the post until 2023. In this role he oversaw the hiring of the college's first two directors of proposal development, one for the sciences and mathematics and one for the humanities. The college received a record $23.4 million in research awards in 2022, and its research expenditures reached a record $19.7 million in 2023.

In November 2025 Middleton returned to the post as interim associate dean for creativity, scholarship and research, after Jennifer Ross was appointed interim dean of the university's College of Engineering and Computer Science. The interim appointment ran until 30 June 2026. On 1 July 2026 he was succeeded by the geologist Gregory Hoke and became interim chair of the Department of Mathematics.

Research

In 1992 Middleton showed analytically that, in models of sliding charge density waves and related driven systems with randomness, a sliding configuration approaches a unique solution at long times. The same year he formulated the Biham–Middleton–Levine traffic model with Ofer Biham and Dov Levine.

In 1993, with Ned Wingreen, he studied collective charge transport in arrays of small metal dots separated by tunnel barriers. They showed that disorder produces a threshold voltage for conduction that grows linearly with the size of the array, and predicted analytically how the current grows above the threshold. With Chao Tang he explained the self-organized criticality of the Olami–Feder–Christensen model, which has no conservation law, as the result of synchronisation between its elements.

His later work applied exact optimisation algorithms to disordered magnets. With Daniel Fisher he studied the zero-temperature ordering transition of the three-dimensional random-field Ising magnet.

With his doctoral student Creighton K. Thomas he developed a fast matching algorithm for ground states of two-dimensional Ising spin glasses, based on the Kasteleyn treatment of the Ising model.

Awards

Middleton was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010 for "his innovative numerical studies of the dynamical and static properties of disordered condensed matter systems, including charge density waves, spin glasses and disordered elastic media".

He received the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1995.

Middleton was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Alan Middleton". College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University. Retrieved 15 May 2021.
  2. ↑ Enslin, Rob (May 9, 2017). "Alan Middleton Appointed A&S Associate Dean". Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 15 May 2021.
  3. ↑ "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). July 2017. Retrieved 16 May 2021.
  4. ↑ Middleton, Arthur Alan (October 1990). Critical and qualitative behavior of sliding charge density waves (PhD). Princeton University. OCLC 83953264. Retrieved 15 May 2021.
  5. 1 2 Enslin, Rob (May 9, 2017). "Alan Middleton Appointed A&S Associate Dean". Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 15 May 2021.
  6. 1 2 3 "Interim Associate Dean for Research Announced". College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University. 10 November 2025. Retrieved 26 October 2026.
  7. ↑ Mattingly, Justin (3 March 2015). "SU uses gift to establish Charles Brightman Endowed Professorship of Physics". The Daily Orange. Retrieved 16 May 2021.
  8. ↑ "A&S Names New Associate Dean for Creativity, Scholarship and Research". Syracuse University News. 2 July 2026. Retrieved 26 October 2026.
  9. ↑ Middleton, A. Alan (3 February 1992). "Asymptotic uniqueness of the sliding state for charge-density waves". Physical Review Letters. 68 (5): 670–673. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.68.670. PMID 10045960.
  10. ↑ Biham, Ofer; Middleton, A. Alan; Levine, Dov (November 1992). "Self-organization and a dynamical transition in traffic-flow models". Phys. Rev. A. 46 (10). American Physical Society: R6124–R6127. arXiv:cond-mat/9206001. Bibcode:1992PhRvA..46.6124B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.46.R6124. ISSN 1050-2947. PMID 9907993. S2CID 14543020.
  11. ↑ Middleton, A. Alan; Wingreen, Ned S. (8 November 1993). "Collective transport in arrays of small metallic dots". Physical Review Letters. 71 (19): 3198–3201. arXiv:cond-mat/9304013. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.71.3198. PMID 10054882.
  12. ↑ Middleton, A. Alan; Tang, Chao (30 January 1995). "Self-Organized Criticality in Nonconserved Systems". Physical Review Letters. 74 (5): 742–745. arXiv:cond-mat/9407082. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.74.742. PMID 10058836.
  13. ↑ Middleton, A. Alan; Fisher, Daniel S. (19 March 2002). "Three-dimensional random-field Ising magnet: Interfaces, scaling, and the nature of states". Physical Review B. 65 (13): 134411. arXiv:cond-mat/0107489. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.65.134411.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link)
  14. ↑ Thomas, Creighton K.; Middleton, A. Alan (17 December 2007). "Matching Kasteleyn cities for spin glass ground states". Physical Review B. 76 (22): 220406. arXiv:0706.2866. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.76.220406.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link)
  15. ↑ "APS Fellow Archive". www.aps.org. American Physical Society. Retrieved 15 May 2021.
  16. ↑ Middleton, A. Alan (1 March 1999). "Computational complexity of determining the barriers to interface motion in random systems". Physical Review E. 59 (3): 2571–2577. arXiv:cond-mat/9902203. Bibcode:1999PhRvE..59.2571M. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.59.2571. S2CID 56166087. Retrieved 16 May 2021. This work has been supported by .... Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
  17. ↑ Pinholster, Ginger (20 November 2016). "2016 AAAS Fellows Honored for Advancing Science to Serve Society". American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved 15 May 2021.
  18. ↑ Manley, Amy (December 15, 2016). "Physics Chair Honored for Innovation, Education, Leadership". College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University. Retrieved 15 May 2021.