Dan M. Stamper-Kurn came to Berkeley following his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. 2000) and postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology (1999 – 2001). He is the recipient of the 2000 APS Division of Atomic, Optical and Molecular Physics Outstanding Thesis award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2001 – 2003), the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2002 – 2007), and the Presidential Young Investigator Award in Science and Engineering (2002). He holds the Class of 1936 Second Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences...
Dmitry Budker received his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley in 1993 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University until his faculty appointment in 1995. Born in the former USSR, Budker was a student at the Novosibirsk State University from 1980 until 1985, when he received an equivalent to MS with honors from the Department of Physics. He then served as a junior researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Physics, where he conducted research on laser spectroscopy of atoms. In 1994, Budker received the American Physical Society Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic,...
Frances Hellman received her BA in Physics from Dartmouth College in 1978, graduating summa cum laude and phi beta kappa with high honors in physics. She received her PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1985, studying what were then considered the high Tc superconductors (the A15's). After a 2 year postdoc in thin film magnetism at AT&T Bell Labs, she went to UCSD as an assistant professor in 1987, where she received tenure in 1994 and became a full professor in 2000. She joined the Physics Dept at UC Berkeley in Jan 2005, and became Chair of the Department in 2007. She...
Naomi S. Ginsberg is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Faculty Scientist in the Materials Sciences and Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Imaging Divisions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she has been since 2010. She currently focuses on elucidating the electronic and molecular dynamics in a wide variety of soft electronic and biological materials by devising new electron and optical imaging modalities that enable characterization of fast and ultrafast processes at the nanoscale and as a function of their...
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 physics department at the University of California, Berkeley in the summer of 2006. In 2006, Irfan was awarded the George E. Valley, Jr. prize by the American Physical Society for the development of the Josephson bifurcation amplifier. In 2007, he was awarded the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the Hellman Family Faculty Fund, and...
James Analytis joined the faculty in January 2013 as the Charles Kittel Chair in condensed matter physics, and served as Department Chair from 2020-2023. He received his B.Sc. in physics from Canterbury University in 2001 and his D. Phil. from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes' Scholar in 2006. At Oxford, he worked with Stephen Blundell and Arzhang Ardavan on experimental and computational studies of quasi-two dimensional organic superconductors. Following his graduate studies, Analytis was a Lloyd's Tercentenary Fellow at the University of Bristol, where he worked on...
From top left: Scanning tunneling microscope images of electrons evolving into a single Wigner molecule (bottom right). Credit: Berkeley Lab
Electrons typically travel at high speeds, zipping through matter unbound. In the 1930s, physicist Eugene Wigner predicted that electrons could be coaxed into stillness at low densities and cold temperatures, forming an electron ice that would later be called...
Aziza is an experimental physicist working on hybrid quantum systems with Rydberg atoms, superconducting circuits, and diamond nanophotonics. Her interests include novel quantum interfaces and the generation of entangled resources across different platforms for quantum processing, communication, and sensing.
Currently, she is a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard, working on quantum networks based on silicon vacancy defects in diamond nanophotonic cavities. During her PhD at the University of Chicago, she worked on quantum transduction using Rydberg atoms in optical and superconducting...
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...
