David Chandler was a distinguished physical chemist and the Bruce H. Mahan Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley whose career transformed the foundations of statistical mechanics. Born in New York City on October 15, 1944, he earned his S.B. in Chemistry from MIT in 1966 and completed his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics at Harvard University in 1969 under the guidance of renowned scientists. Chandler began his academic journey as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1970, rapidly ascending to full professor by 1977, before moving to the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and ultimately joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1986 where he remained for the rest of his career. His remarkable intellectual journey, despite early learning challenges, led him to become one of the most influential figures in modern physical chemistry, working alongside some of the world's premier scientists.
Chandler's groundbreaking research fundamentally reshaped the theoretical understanding of liquids, condensed matter, and complex systems through his development of the WCA theory with Hans Andersen and John Weeks in 1971, which quickly became the standard framework for understanding liquid state phenomena. He pioneered the modern language and concepts for describing the structure and dynamics of liquids, enabling quantitative treatments of simple and polyatomic fluids, aqueous solutions, hydrophobic effects, and polymeric systems that had previously eluded rigorous analysis. In the late 1990s, Chandler and his collaborators developed the revolutionary transition path sampling method, a statistical mechanics approach for studying rare events in complex systems that has been widely applied to biochemical processes, nucleation phenomena, and metastable systems. His later work on the statistical physics of trajectory space enabled the study of systems far from equilibrium, including self-assembly processes and the glass transition, culminating in a novel approach to glassy dynamics with Juan Garrahan that demonstrated a first-order dynamical transition in trajectory space.
Beyond his direct research contributions, Chandler profoundly shaped the field of statistical mechanics through his exceptional mentorship, having trained and guided over 100 doctoral and postdoctoral students who have gone on to make significant contributions across chemistry, physics, and biology. His influential textbook Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics, celebrated for its clarity and pedagogical excellence, has educated generations of students and remains a standard reference in the field decades after its publication. Chandler established the renowned Berkeley Statistical Mechanics Meeting in 2000, an annual gathering that fostered interdisciplinary collaboration and broke down barriers between scientific disciplines for over fifteen years under his leadership. His election to both the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London, along with numerous prestigious awards including the Irving Langmuir Prize, reflects the extraordinary impact of his work, which continues to provide the conceptual and methodological foundation for understanding complex systems across the physical and biological sciences.
