Beate Schmittmann is a German-American condensed matter physicist and academic administrator who is dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Iowa State University. Her research includes work on driven diffusive systems, biomolecular transport, and epidemiology. Education and career Schmittmann earned a diploma in physics in 1981 from RWTH Aachen University, and completed a Ph.D. in 1984 at the University of Edinburgh. Her dissertation was jointly supervised by David Wallace and A. D. Bruce. After working as a researcher and then assistant professor at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, she moved to the US in 1991 to become an associate professor of physics at Virginia Tech. She was promoted to full professor in 1997, and served as department chair from 2006 until 2012, when she moved to Iowa State as dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In 2017, Schmittmann was reappointed to the LAS deanship. While working in the United States, Schmittmann acquired American citizenship. In 2019, she was considered a finalist for the provost position at the University of Georgia. Book Schmittmann is the coauthor with Royce King-Ping Zia of the book Statistical Mechanics of Driven Diffusive Systems (Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena, vol. 17, Academic Press, 1995). Recognition Schmittmann was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2004, after a nomination from the APS Topical Group on Statistical & Nonlinear Physics, for "seminal and sustained research on fundamental and applied problems in non-equilibrium statistical physics, in particular driven diffusive systems". In 2010, the Southeastern Section of the APS gave her their for research excellence. Schmittmann was the first woman to receive the Beams Award. She became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015 for "seminal and sustained research on fundamental and applied problems in nonequilibrium statistical physics, and for contributions to administration and to increasing diversity in STEM". References Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century German physicists German women physicists 21st-century American physicists RWTH Aachen University alumni Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Academic staff of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf Virginia Tech faculty Iowa State University faculty Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Physical Society American women physicists 21st-century American women scientists Naturalized citizens of the United States 20th-century American women scientists 20th-century American physicists American condensed matter physicists German emigrants to the United States American university