Robert Walter Zwanzig (9 April 1928[1] – May 15, 2014[2]) was an American theoretical physicist and chemist who made important contributions to the statistical mechanics of irreversible processes, protein folding, and the theory of liquids and gases.
His thesis title was Quantum Hydrodynamics: a statistical mechanical theory of light scattering from simple non-polar fluids.
From 1988 onwards he was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was a Fogarty Scholar (1987–88) and later worked as a research scientist emeritus.
[3] In the early 1960s he wrote some now classic works on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of irreversible processes.
[6][7] He received many awards, including He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Chemical Society.