JQI fellow and University of Maryland physics professor Victor Galitski has been awarded a Simons Foundation Investigator grant, entailing a million-dollar unrestricted research fund to be used over a ten-year period. The university and its physics department will also receive funds for overhead maintenance.

Prof Galitski’s area of research is theoretical condensed matter physics. One example of his recent work is to show how one can take a conventional semiconductor and endow it with topological properties without subjecting the material to extreme environmental conditions or fundamentally changing its solid state structure (the work appearing online in Nature Physics March 13, 2011).