Susan Nan Coppersmith (born March 18, 1957)[1] is an American condensed matter physicist.
[3] Coppersmith was born on March 18, 1957, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania;[1][4] her parents were a lawyer and a piano teacher.
After a year of study as a Churchill Scholar in applied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, she went to Cornell University for additional graduate study, completing a doctorate in physics there in 1983.
[6] Fisher was at Bell Labs at the time, and Coppersmith herself did most of her doctoral research at Bell Labs, so the official chair of her doctoral committee was instead N. David Mermin.
[3] Coppersmith's research has included such varied topics as the way seashells stack together on the beach, the folding patterns of thin gold sheets, the crystalline structure in layers of mother of pearl, the propagation of forces within granular materials, the relation between the atomic structure of materials and their bulk strength, and the design of nano-scale devices for quantum computing.