Faculty

Na Ji

Professor

Na Ji received her B.S. in Chemical Physics from the University of Science & Technology of China in 2000. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California Berkeley in 2005, working in the laboratory of Yuen-Ron Shen. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Materials Sciences Division of LBNL for 10 months, before moving to the Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute to continue her postdoctoral training in 2006. She became a Group Leader at Janelia Research Campus in 2011. She returned to join the Physics and Molecular & Cell Biology...

Steven Kahn

Dean of Mathematical & Physical Sciences, Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy
Steven M. Kahn is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy. He previously served on the faculty in these departments from 1984-98, but returned to Berkeley in 2022 to take up the position of Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Kahn received his A.B. (summa cum laude) from Columbia in 1975 and his Ph.D. in physics at Berkeley in 1980. In addition to Berkeley, he has served on the faculties of Columbia, where he was the I.I. Rabi Professor of Physics, and at Stanford, where he was the Cassius Lamb Kirk Professor in the Natural Sciences. Kahn is an experimental astrophysicist and cosmologist...

Dan Kasen

Professor

Prof. Kasen received his B.S. from Stanford University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley. Prior to returning to Cal, he was the Alan C. Davis fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a Hubble fellow at UC Santa Cruz. He joined the Berkeley physics faculty in 2010, jointly appointed with the nuclear science division at LBNL.

Edgar Knobloch

Professor

Edgar Knobloch, Ph.D., Harvard University (1978), Sc.D. University of Cambridge (1994). Faculty member since 1978.

Research Interests

My research interests center on nonlinear dynamics of dissipative systems. These focus on bifurcation theory, particularly in systems with symmetries, transition to chaos in such systems, low- and high-dimensional behavior of continuous systems, including spatial localization, and the theory of nonlinear waves. Applications include pattern formation in fluid systems, reaction-diffusion systems, and related systems of importance in geophysics and...

Shimon Kolkowitz

Associate Professor and Herst Chair in Physics

Shimon Kolkowitz is an atomic physicist and quantum scientist, with his experimental research focusing on quantum sensing, precision measurement, and metrology. Shimon’s research group has pioneered new techniques and applications for ultra-precise optical atomic clocks, and new measurement tools that make use of atom-scale defects in diamond. Shimon was an undergraduate at Stanford University, graduating with distinction in 2008 with a B.S. in Physics. Shimon earned his PhD in experimental physics at Harvard in 2015 with advisor Professor Mikhail Lukin, where his research focused on...

Yury Kolomensky

Professor

Yury G. Kolomensky joined the Physics Department faculty in July 2000. He received a B.S. in Physics at St. Petersburg Technical University and M.S. in Physics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1997, where his work on the spin structure of the nucleon was awarded the 1998 Outstanding Thesis in Nuclear Physics Award from the American Physics Society. He was a Robert A. Millikan Postdoctoral Scholar in Physics at CalTech from 1997 to 2000.

Research Interests

I am an experimental particle physicist...

Alessandra Lanzara

Professor, Charles Kittel Chair in Physics

Alessandra Lanzara received her PhD in physics from Universita’ di Roma La Sapienza, Italy in 1999. She was a postdoc at Stanford University for three years since 1999. In 2002 she joined the physics Department faculty at UC Berkeley as Assistant Professor and since 2011 she is a Full Professor. She is also a Senior Faculty Scientist at the Materials Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2002.

She is recipient of many prizes among which was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2008 and elected to the American Academy of Art and Science in...

Adrian Lee

Professor

Adrian Lee joined the faculty in July 2000. He received his B.A. in physics from Columbia University in 1986 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1993. At Stanford, he worked with Blas Cabrera on the early development of an experiment to detect non-baryonic dark matter. Following graduate school, Lee became a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Medical School, where he worked on mapping functions in the human brain using magnetic resonance imaging. Subsequently, from 1994 to 2000, he did postdoctoral work at U.C. Berkeley with Paul Richards measuring spatial anisotropy in the 2.7 K cosmic...

Dung-Hai Lee

Professor

Professor Dung-Hai Lee received his B.S. degree from the National Tsinghua University of Taiwan. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977 for graduate studies, and received his Ph.D. in physics in 1982. After staying at M.I.T. for another two years, he joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 1984. Professor Lee spent eleven years at IBM, and came to Berkeley in February 1994.

Research Interests

Professor Lee is a theoretical condensed matter physicist. The principal goal of his research is to uncover new states of matter and understand their physical...

Stephen Leone

The John R. Thomas Professor in Physics

Dr. Leone received his B.A. in Chemistry at Northwestern University in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley with Professor C. Bradley Moore in 1974. He was an assistant professor at the University of Southern California from 1974-76. He assumed a position with NIST and the University of Colorado in 1976 and became a full professor in 1982. Dr. Leone was a Fellow and staff member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a Fellow of JILA, as well as an Adjoint Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a Lecturer of Physics at the...