James Arthur Krumhansl (August 2, 1919 – May 6, 2004) was an American physicist who specialized in condensed matter physics and materials science.
[3] In 1944 he left Cornell for the Stromberg-Carlson Company, where he researched microwave pulse communication systems for the U.S. Navy during World War II.
[4] He remained at Stromberg-Carlson until 1946, when he became an assistant professor of physics and applied mathematics at Brown University.
[3][5] In retirement he held adjunct professorships at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Dartmouth College.
[6] As President he advocated for more visas and immigration opportunities for Chinese scholars following the Tiananmen square massacre of 1989.
[3] Krumhansl worked primarily in theoretical[6] condensed matter physics and materials science.
[4] During his time at Penn he and John Robert Schrieffer formulated an influential model of structural phase transitions based in statistical mechanics.
[4] His broad interests, spanning not only his own areas of physics but also information theory, applied mathematics, metallurgy, and biophysics, led him to characterize himself as a "gadfly".
[1] In 1987, while serving as the American Physical Society's President-elect, Krumhansl testified before the Science Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, arguing against building the Superconducting Super Collider.
He died May 6, 2004, at Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, following a stroke,[2] one month after giving an invited lecture at a conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico.