Stanley was a Miller Fellow at University of California, Berkeley with Charles Kittel, where he wrote an Oxford monograph Introduction to Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena which won the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book of 1971.
He was appointed Hermann von Helmholtz Associate Professor in 1973, in recognition of his interdepartmental teaching and research with the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
His early work introduced the n-vector model of magnetism and its exact solution in the limit nà infinity, topics that are now part of standard statistical physics textbooks.
His seminal work on liquid water started with a percolation model he developed in 1980 with José Teixeira to explain the experimentally observed anticorrelations in entropy and volume.
[4] In 1992 he developed the liquid-liquid critical point hypothesis, that offered a quantitative understanding of water’s anomalies, applying to all liquids with tetrahedral symmetry (such as silicon and silica).
Using the Hirsch H Index metric for publication impact [PNAS 102, 16569 (2005)], Stanley has authored 129 papers with a citation count equal to or greater than 129, so H = 129.
Stanley awarded the 2004 APS Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service, "For his extraordinary contributions to human rights, for his initiatives on behalf of female physicists, and for his caring and supportive relationship with those who have worked in his laboratory.