Professor Emeritus, Chancellor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School
Professor Birgeneau received his Ph.D. in Physics from Yale University in 1966 with Professor Werner Wolf. He was on the faculty of Yale for one year and then spent one year at Oxford University. He was at Bell Laboratories from 1968 to 1975 and then went to MIT in September 1975 as Professor of Physics. In 1988 he became head of the department and in 1991 became Dean of Science at MIT. In 2000, he became President of the University of Toronto. In 2004 he became UC Berkeley’s Chancellor and joined the Physics faculty. He concluded his service as Chancellor at the end of May 2013 and is now...
Schematic of a bilayer 2D semiconducting device. Image: Ruishi Qi/Berkeley Lab
The advance establishes a new solid-state platform for studying high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates in semiconductor devices, and could one day enable quantum information science, quantum simulations, coherent optoelectronics, and future exciton-based devices.
Professor Naomi Ginsberg, professor of chemistry and physics.
May 18, 2026
The Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech today announced the 2026 class of Brown Investigators. The cohort, the third to be selected through the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences, comprises eight distinguished mid-career faculty working on fundamental challenges in the physical sciences,...
The "Frontiers in Correlated Quantum Materials" workshop is convened to capture a unique moment of convergence in exotic materials, bringing together the communities driving experimental discovery with those pioneering computational methods...
Aziza Suleymanzade is an Assistant Professor, holding the endowed Robert J. Birgeneau Professorship in Physics. Her group explores hybrid quantum systems that combine Rydberg atoms, superconducting circuits, and nanophotonics. Her research focuses on creating novel quantum interfaces and generating entanglement resources that link these platforms for quantum information processing, communication, and sensing.
Prior to joining Berkeley, Aziza was a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard University, working on silicon-vacancy-based quantum networks in diamond nanophotonic cavities. She...
Seven UC Berkeley faculty members have been named 2026 Sloan Research Fellows, an honor widely regarded as one of the most prestigious awards for early-career researchers in the United States and Canada.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced this year’s 126 fellows, recognizing exceptional young...
Irfan Siddiqi received his AB (1997) in chemistry & physics from Harvard University. He then went on to receive a PhD (2002) in applied physics from Yale University, where he stayed as a postdoctoral researcher until 2005. Irfan joined the faculty at the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley in the summer of 2006. He is also a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Irfan served as Department Chair from 2023-2026.
His research group focuses on the development of advanced...
Yuan Cao is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Physics. 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 in 2024.
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...
The Joe Orenstein Group has published their findings on antiferromagnetic spin wavepackets in Nature Physics.
The spin of the electron is Nature’s perfect quantum bit, capable of extending the range of information storage beyond “one” or “zero.” Consequently, exploiting the electron...
