Jerry Tersoff is a Principal Research Staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He has worked in diverse areas relating to surfaces, interfaces, and materials physics. His recent research includes theory of semiconductor nanowire growth; nanoscale effects in heteroepitaxy, including stress-driven formation of quantum dots; and the physics of carbon nanotube devices. His early work includes theories of scanning tunneling microscopy, Schottky barriers, and heterojunction band lineups. He also developed model interatomic potentials that are widely used in materials simulations.

His work has been recognized by the Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society, the Medard Welch Award of the American Vacuum Society, and the MRS Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the APS, AVS, and MRS. His papers have been cited over 36,000 times, with an h-index of 84, and he is first author of 9 papers cited over 1000 times each. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society (2003-2005) and on the Editorial Board of Journal of Applied Physics and Applied Physics Letters (2001-2003). He received his B.A. in Physics from Swarthmore College, and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley.