Prof. L.J. de Jongh became a member of the scientific staff of the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory at University of Leiden in the fall of 1973, and was appointed as professor of physics in 1986. He took his retirement in 2007.
Jos de Jongh was born near Padang in Indonesia in 1942. He finished his high school education (Gymnasium b) in 1960 in Hilversum, The Netherlands, and went on to study physics at the University of Amsterdam, where he graduated in 1968. He then became a graduate student at the Natuurkundig Laboratorium of the same University under Professor Andries Miedema and received his doctorate in physics (cum laude) in 1974, with a Ph.D. thesis entitled: “Experiments on simple magnetic model systems”. The thesis was edited as a Monograph in Physics by Taylor & Francis, London, 1973, and published in Adv. Phys. 23 (1974). Directly after having received his doctorate degree he moved to the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory at Leiden University, where he joined the research group of Professor Jan Huiskamp. In the period August 1981 to August 1982 he was a visiting professor at the Université Scientifique et Médicale de Grenoble, France, doing research at the High-Field Laboratory (MPI) with D. Bloch, J. Voiron and Chr. Vettier, and at the Lab. de Diffraction Neutronique, Centre d'Etudes Nucléaires, with J. Rossat-Mignod and L.P. Regnault. From 1993 to 1995 he was chairman of the Kamelingh Onnes Laboratory and from 1995 to 2000 he served as the scientific director of the Leiden Institute of Physics.
His scientific interests lie in various subfields of condensed matter physics, including phase transitions, low-dimensional magnetic systems, magnetic solitons, metal cluster compounds, high-Tc superconducting oxides, magnetic molecular clusters and single molecule magnets, nanoparticles and nanowires. In the course of years he has been advisor/co-advisor for 45 Ph.D. theses and author/co-author of about 300 research papers on the above subjects.