John R. Kirtley

John R. Kirtley (1949- ) is a research physicist. He received his BA in Physics from UCSB in 1971 and his PhD in Physics from the same school in 1976. His PdD topic was inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy, with Paul Hansma as his thesis advisor. He was then a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 1976-1978, working in the group of Don Langenberg on non-equilibrium superconductivity. From 1978 to the present, he has been a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. While there he has worked in the fields of Surface Enhanced Raman scattering, light emission from tunnel junctions and electron injection devices, noise in semiconducting devices, scanning tunneling microscopy and scanning SQUID microscopy. He shared the 1998 Oliver E. Buckley prize of the American Physical Society, "For using phase-sensitive experiments in the elucidation of the orbital symmetry of the pairing function in high-Tc superconductors", with C.C. Tsuei, D.M. Ginsberg, and D.J. van Harlingen. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He is married to Kathryn Barr Kirtley, who received her PhD from UCSB in quantum chemistry in 1977. They have one son, the writer David Barr Kirtley.