Vladimir Manucharyan, who was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, is an experimentalist researching solid state physics with a focus on fundamental aspects of superconductivity and quantum technology applications. He is a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and a member of the Physics Frontier Center. While at UMD he has received a Sloan Research Fellowship, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Google Faculty Research Award. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale University in 2012, researching quantum information with superconducting qubits, and was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows for the term 2010-2013 before joining UMD in 2014.

Arpita Upadhyaya, who was promoted to the rank of Professor, is a biophysicist studying how physical properties of living cells are regulated to guide mechanical behaviors such as cell shape changes and force generation and how these guide physical regulation of cell function. Upadhyaya has received a Pappalardo Fellowship in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship from the UMD Department of Physics. She holds a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, and in addition to her work at MIT, was a researcher at UNC Chapel Hill before joining the Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology (IPST) in 2006.

Jay Sau, who was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, is a condensed matter theorist studying topological principles to create protected solid-state and cold-atomic systems for quantum information processing. He is a member of the Joint Quantum Institute and Condensed Matter Theory Center, and has won an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He also received the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship from the UMD Department of Physics. Sau holds a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, and held postdoctoral appointments at Berkeley, the University of Maryland and Harvard University before his appointment as a UMD Assistant Professor in 2013.

Alberto Belloni, who was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, is an experimental particle physicist who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He has held several posts within the collaboration, and in September 2018 became convener of the CMS Standard Model Physics Vector-Bosons subgroup of about 100 physicists, dedicated to inclusive electroweak boson studies. In August 2018 he received the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship from the UMD Department of Physics. Belloni holds a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was a post-doctoral associate and research associate at Harvard University before his appointment as a UMD Assistant Professor in 2013.