Faculty

Carlos Bustamante

Professor

Carlos Bustamante received his B.S. in 1973 from Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia; M.S. in 1975 from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos; Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley; Fellow of the American Physical Society since 1996; Physics Department faculty member since 1998. Named an investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2000.

Research Interests

Fifty years ago, biochemists described cells as small vessels that contain a complex mixture of chemical species undergoing reactions through diffusion and random collision. This description was...

Yuan Cao

Assistant Professor

Yuan Cao is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science starting July 2024. He obtained bachelor's degree at University of Science and Technology of China in 2014, and master's degree and Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016 and 2020 respectively. From 2021 to 2024, he served as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University, before joining Berkeley as faculty.

His primary research interest is in the electrical, optical, and mechanical properties of low-dimensional materials, and how to engineer these properties and find applications for them using...

William Chinowsky

Professor Emeritus

Professor of Physics, UC Berkeley, since 1961, Emeritus since 1993. A.B. from Columbia University; Ph.D. from Columbia University, 1955. Staff Physicist, Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1954-1961; Guggenheim Fellow, 1966-67, 1978-1979, Fellow, American Physical Society. Program Director, National Science Foundation, 1992-1996. Staff Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

John Clarke

Professor Emeritus of the Graduate School

John Clarke received his B.A. (1964), Ph.D. (1968), and Sc.D. (2005) from Cambridge University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, he joined the Physics faculty in 1969. He received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1983. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Physics (UK). He has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Miller Professor. In 1987, he was named California Scientist of the Year and was awarded the Fritz London Prize for research...

Marvin Cohen

University Professor of Physics, Professor Emeritus, Professor of the Graduate School

Marvin L. Cohen is University Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Cohen’s current and past research covers a broad spectrum of subjects in theoretical condensed matter physics. He is a recipient of the National Medal of Science, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, the American Physical Society Oliver E. Buckley Prize for Solid State Physics, the Dickson Prize in Science, the Von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society, the American Physical Society Julius Edgar Lilienfeld...

Michael Crommie

Professor

Mike Crommie received a B.S. degree in physics from UCLA in 1984 and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1991. He was a postdoc at IBM Almaden for two years before becoming an Assistant Professor in the Physics Dept. at Boston University in 1994. He moved his laboratory to the UC Berkeley Physics Dept. in 6/99 and joined the Berkeley faculty as an Associate Professor. Awards and honors include a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award (1994), the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize for 1993-94, and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1997).

Research Interests

My main research interests...

Liang Dai

Assistant Professor and The Michael M. Garland Chair in Physics

Prof. Dai received a B.S. in Physics from Peking University in 2011. Later on, he earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the Johns Hopkins University in 2015 working on theoretical cosmology. From 2015 to 2018, he was awarded an NASA Einstein fellowship and was appointed a postdoctoral Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Natural Sciences. From 2018 to 2020, he was a long-term John Bahcall postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, before he joined the faculty in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Research Interests

...

Marc Davis

Professor Emeritus

Marc Davis received his B.S. in 1969 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in 1973 from Princeton. After a lectureship at Princeton he was an assistant/associate Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University from 1975, and moved to Berkeley in 1981. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow and a Miller Professor.

Research Interests

My research is focused on...

Michael DeWeese

Professor

Michael DeWeese received his BA (1988) in physics from UC Santa Cruz and his PhD (1995) in physics from Princeton. From 1995-1999 he took a computational postdoctoral appointment at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, with a fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He then pursued experimental neuroscience as a postdoctoral researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, NY from 2000-2006. In 2007 he took a junior faculty position at UC Berkeley and he is currently an Associate Professor of Physics and Neuroscience.

Research Interests

Our group’s research...

Robert Ely

Professor Emeritus

Professor of Physics, UC Berkeley, since 1962, Emeritus since 1993. B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1959. United States Air Force, 1952-1956; Physicist, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, 1959-1962.