Raised with 10 siblings on a dairy farm near Rose Hill, Kansas, Warren E. Pickett became interested in physics when he was a young boy. His older brothers helped stoke his interest: one built and flew U-controlled airplanes, and another taught him about complex numbers. After evening milking, they could build various apparatuses in the basement.
While a student at Wichita State, Warren majored in physics and math. He cites Joseph Strecker as one of his most influential faculty mentors, and who introduced him to many-body theory and served as his master’s thesis advisor. Additionally, Skip Loper offered him his first teaching opportunity as the instructor of an entry-level physics class for employees of local airplane companies.
Upon leaving Wichita State, Warren moved to New York to study theoretical condensed matter physics at Stony Brook University. After postdoctoral appointments at the University of Bristol; the University of California, Berkeley; and Northwestern University, he joined a condensed matter theory group at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. After 18 years there and rising to the position of senior scientist, Warren joined the physics department at the University of California, Davis.
Over his career, much of Warren’s research has revolved around computational implementations of the density functional approach to understanding the electronic behavior of solids at the microscopic level. His many scientific achievements include demonstrating formally the possibility of single spin superconductivity in a half-metallic antiferromagnet, and providing the explanation for the surprising 40 kelvin superconductivity in magnesium diboride only four months after its discovery.
Warren’s research has been supported by the Naval Research Laboratory; the Office of Naval Research; the U.S. Department of Energy; and the National Science Foundation. His professional service activities include chair of the Division of Condensed Matter Physics for the American Physical Society and serving on the scientific advisory boards of the Max Planck Institute, and the Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Ames national laboratories. His international outreach and mentorships have included universities in Iran and Malaysia, and the coordination of conferences held in Tunisia, Morocco, South Korea and Germany. He has participated in research teams at the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
Two of Warren's many recognitions include the E. O. Hulbert Award and the Sigma Xi Technical Achievement Award in Pure Science, the top two scientific awards presented by the Naval Research Laboratory. He is a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the Institute of Physics, United Kingdom; and the American Physical Society. He has also been a Watkins Visiting Professor, returning to Wichita State in 2009 to give a lecture on electron behavior in strongly correlated oxides.
Warren holds a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics, and a master’s degree in physics, both from Wichita State. He earned his doctorate in physics at Stony Brook University. He retired as a distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Davis in 2021. He and his wife Jill, a retired school counselor, live in Davis.