Allan H.
MacDonald

Allan H. MacDonald is a Canadian theoretical physicist based at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair in Physics. After completing his undergraduate studies at St. Francis Xavier University, he moved to the University of Toronto to work on density functional theory with Stephen H. Vosko and received his PhD in 1978.

MacDonald developed his career across several institutions. He spent a number of years at the Ottawa laboratory of the National Research Council of Canada and later joined the faculty at Indiana University. He also held visiting positions at ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart. During this period, he made influential contributions to the theory of correlated electron systems, including major advances in the understanding of the quantum Hall effect and the fractional quantum Hall effect.

Following the first experimental studies on graphene, MacDonald became deeply interested in this atomically thin material and its derivatives. In 2011, he and Rafi Bistritzer developed a theoretical framework describing the electronic properties of twisted bilayer graphene, predicting the emergence of flat electronic bands and the existence of a magic angle that would later prove central to the field of twistronics.

MacDonald’s scientific achievements have been recognised with numerous awards, including the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Herzberg Medal of the Canadian Association of Physicists, and the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society. He is also a fellow of several academic organisations, among them the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.