[3] He completed his doctorate from Stanford University in 1979, under the supervision of Leonard Susskind,[1] and came to Illinois faculty as a postdoctoral researcher with Gordon Baym and Michael Wortis, later staying on as an assistant professor.
[3] Fradkin has worked in many areas in theoretical condensed matter physics and is notably broad and versatile in his research topics.
He also gave one of the earliest approaches to higher dimensional bosonization of fermionic field theories (with Fidel Schaposnik) as well as two-dimensional Fermi surfaces (with his then student Antonio Castro-Neto) and has later applied them to important problems in condensed matter.
Some of his other important works in recent times that have not already been mentioned above include a graph-theoretic lattice discretization scheme for Chern-Simons theories and its applications to condensed matter problems, and novel field theoretic approaches to describe fractional topological insulators.
[2] In 2024 he was awarded the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal "for pioneering applications of quantum field theory to the understanding of emergent, many-body physics of quantum systems, in particular composite fermions, and electronic liquid crystalline and pair density wave phases of correlated electronic systems.