Jorge Sofo got his undergraduate degree from the Instituto Balseiro, Centro Atómico Bariloche, with a fellowship from the Atomic Energy Commission of Argentina. He graduated in December 1988 with the title of “Licenciado en Física”; His Undergraduate thesis was titled “Calculations of Charge Density and Characteristic Curves of Semiconducting Heterojunctions.” In November 1991, he got his Ph.D. in physics under the supervision of Professor Carlos A. Balseiro. The topic of his thesis was “Superconductivity in Systems with Local Interactions: From BCS to Bose Condensation.” From January 1992 to July 1995, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, USA, under the advice of Professor Gerald D. Mahan. He worked on the theoretical modeling of thermoelectric materials. In July 1995, he went back to Bariloche as Assistant Professor at the Instituto Balseiro and as Fellow of the “Consejo National de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas.” During this period, he worked on hydrogen storage and hydrogen embrittlement in metallic alloys. During his time in Argentina, he held the position of Visiting Professor at the University of Tennessee.
In November 2001, he became the founding Director of the Materials Simulation Center, a facility of the Materials Research Institute at The Pennsylvania State University. Since then, he became Associate Professor of Physics in 2005, and Full Professor in 2010.
Jorge’s research is in the area of theoretical condensed matter physics with interests in strong interactions, surfaces, transport, and quantum dissipative systems. He is the author of more than 120 scientific articles. These include the theoretical proposal of a new material, called graphane , which has more than 1,600 cites, and the description of the ideal band structure for a thermoelectric material , which has more than 1300 cites. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He was awarded the Cesar Milstein Fellowship. Jorge is also a member of the Board of Directors of the “Fundación Balseiro USA.” He held several visiting professor positions including the University of Graz in Austria, the University of Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, France, the University of Rome, “La Sapienza,” in Italy, the Humboldt University in Berlin, in Germany, and the University of Chicago. He was also a Fellow of the Fritz-Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany.