Christopher Pethick was brought up in England, and was educated at the University of Oxford, where he received his B. A. degree in 1962, and his D. Phil. degree in 1965 for work on liquid helium 4 under the supervision of Dirk ter Haar. In 1965 he became a Fellow by Examination (research fellow) at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1966, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois, and after spending the academic year 1969-1970 in Oxford and at Nordita, he joined the faculty at Illinois as an associate professor, and became full professor there in 1973. Also in 1973 he became Professor of Physics at Nordita, while maintaining his strong connections with the University of Illinois. During the academic year 1973-1974 he was a visiting professor at the Landau Institute in Moscow and at Nordita, and for the calendar year 1995 he was a visiting professor at the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Seattle. He was director of Nordita from 1989-1994.

He was a founding Board member of ECT* (the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas in Trento) (1992-1997), a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Institute for Nuclear Theory and Seattle (1997-1999), an Associate Editor of Reviews of Modern Physics (1997-1999), and a member of the Editorial Board of Physical Review A (2004-2010).

He has contributed to diverse fields of physics, especially the properties of quantum liquids, both normal and superfluid, and the properties of dense matter and neutron stars. For the past 15 years, a major research interest has been the physics of atomic quantum gases and Bose-Einstein condensation.

He is a foreign member of the The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and a Fellow of the Americal Physical Society. In 2008 he received the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society for his work on quantum liquids and ultracold atomic gases and in 2011 the Hans Bethe Prize of the Society for his contributions to the theory of dense matter, neutron stars and stellar collapse.

Last updated: January 2011.