ITHACA, N.Y. -- Robert C. Richardson, the Floyd R. Newman Professor of Physics and vice provost for research at Cornell University, has been elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Richardson also is a member the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell, where he conducts research in the unusual properties of solids and liquids at temperatures closely approaching absolute zero. In 1996 he shared the Nobel Prize in physics with David Lee, the J.G. White Distinguished Professor in Physical Sciences at Cornell, and Douglas Osheroff, now professor of physics at Stanford University, for the discovery of superfluidity in liquid Helium-3.

Richardson attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute, earning his B.S. in 1958 and his M.S. in 1960, both in physics. He came to Cornell in 1966 as a research associate after earning a Ph.D. in physics the same year from Duke University. In 1968 he was named assistant professor of physics at Cornell, associate professor in 1972 and a full professor in 1975. He has served as the Newman Professor since 1987. In 1990 he was named director of the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, a post he relinquished in 1997. He was named vice provost for research in 1998, when the post was first created.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society. Other honors include two Guggenheim fellowships and the Eighth Simon Memorial Prize of the British Physical Society and the Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society, both shared with Lee and Osheroff.

Throughout his years at Cornell, he has pursued research in low-temperature physics, in particular working with Lee and John Reppy, the J.L. Wetherill Professor of Physics. Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, the American Philosophical Society is the oldest learned society in the United States devoted to the advancement of scientific and scholarly inquiry. The society currently has 868 elected members, 728 from the United States and 140 from more than two dozen foreign countries. Thirty-eight American and nine foreign members were elected this year.

Over the society's history, 17 Cornell faculty members and administrators have been elected to membership.