Đàm Thanh Sơn

Born in North Vietnam, Bac Ninh. Sơn attended HUS High School for Gifted Students, where he won gold medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad with an absolute score, and received his Ph.D. at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Moscow in 1995.

Sơn was a postdoc at the University of Washington from 1995 to 1997, and the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics from 1997 to 1999. From 1999 to 2002 he was a professor at Columbia University and a RIKEN-BNL fellow. He moved to Seattle in 2002 when he became a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Nuclear Theory and a professor in the Physics Department, University of Washington. Then in 2012, he moved to Chicago and became the 19th person to hold a University Professorship at University of Chicago.

He is well known to users of the World Wide Web for being the subject of an online meme, 'Dam Son', which features a photograph of Đàm Thanh Sơn in his primary school years.[2]

• Outstanding Junior Investigator in Nuclear Physics, DOE, 2000
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, 2001
• American Physical Society Fellow, 2006
• Simons Investigator Award, 2013
• Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2014
• Elected to National Academy of Sciences, 2014
• Dirac Medal of the ICTP, 2018 [3]
• Bogolyubov Prize, 2019

• Home page at the University of Chicago