Robert Hilborn

Bob Hilborn received a B.A. in physics from Lehigh University in 1966 and earned his physics Ph.D. in 1971 at Harvard under Norman F. Ramsey. After a post-doctoral position at SUNY Stony Brook, he served as a physics faculty member at Oberlin College, Amherst College, and the University of Texas at Dallas. In 2011 he became the Associate Executive Officer of the AAPT and retired from that position in 2024. After serving as President of AAPT in the mid-90s, he chaired the National Task Force on Undergraduate Physics, which led to the SPIN-UP report, fostering a tripling of the number of undergraduate physics degrees awarded in the U.S. He also served as the PI for the Physics and Astronomy Faculty Teaching Institute series. Currently, he serves on the teams for the joint APS-AAPT Effective Practices for Undergraduate Physics Programs (EP3) project, TEAM-UP Together, and CourseSource, which promotes publication of peer-reviewed papers focusing on effective STEM courses. His research has focused on atomic and molecular physics tests of fundamental symmetries, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, computational modeling of gene regulatory networks, and gravitational wave polarization. He is a fellow of AAAS, APS, AAPT, and is the author of Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics 2nd Ed. (Oxford, 2000) and, with co-author Alice Flarend, Quantum Computing: From Alice to Bob (Oxford, 2022) and Quantum Computing and Quantum Physics: A Linear Algebra Approach to be published in 2026.