Theoretical condensed matter physicist Maissam Barkeshli joined the UMD Department of Physics as an Assistant Professor and a JQI Fellow in August, 2016.
Barkeshli received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 2010 following a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a BA in Physics from UC Berkeley. He was a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University (2010-2013) and a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft's Station Q, located at UC Santa Barbara (2013-2016).
He works on complex many-body phenomena involving condensed matter physics, quantum field theory, quantum topology, and quantum information theory. He also works on the science of deep learning, studying fundamental principles underlying the inner workings of modern AI models. In 2018, he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.
Research Area:
Centers & Institutes: Joint Quantum Institute, Condensed Matter Theory Center
Notable papers:
M. Barkeshli, P. Bonderson, M. Cheng, Z. Wang, Symmetry, Defects, and Gauging of Topological Phases," arXiv:1410.4540
M. Barkeshli, E. Berg, S. Kivelson, "Coherent transmutation of electrons into fractionalized anyons," Science, 346 6210 (2014)
Victor Yakovenko is a Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was a recipient of the prestigious David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a theoretical physicist with more than 35 years of research experience in studying electronic properties of various materials. In addition, he joined the emergent econophysics movement around year 2000 by publishing his first econophysics paper. Over the next twenty years, his ideas became increasingly popular and initiated an expanding wave of follow-up papers by many researchers around the world. The work of Yakovenko has also been covered in popular media, such as the New York Times Magazine, American Scientist, New Scientist, Australian Financial Review, Science magazine and the UK Engineering and Technology Magazine. Yakovenko has given about 150 invited talks on this subject. He received his M.S. in Physics and Engineering from the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute in 1984 and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Moscow in 1987, where he was also employed as Research Scientist. In 1991 he began a Postdoc at the Department of Physics, Rutgers University. In 1993 he joined the University of Marlyland, College Park as Assistant Professor and became Associate Professor in 1999 and Full Professor in 2004.
Research:
Centers & Institutes: Condensed Matter Theory Center; Joint Quantum Institute; Physics Frontier Center
Edo Waks received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University while working with Professor Yoshihisa Yamamoto in the area of quantum optics and quantum information. After graduating, he became a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, working with Professor Jelena Vuckovic in the Ginzton Laboratory on nanophotonic implementations of quantum information processing, before joining the ECE Department as assistant professor for the Fall 2006 semester. He received his B.S. and M.S. from the Electrical Engineering Department at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.
Waks is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellow and was a member of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society, at Stanford. He won the Department of Central Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellowship Award sponsored by the Army Research and Development Activity, which funded his postdoctoral research. He received a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship (1996-1999), and the William Huggins Award for Outstanding Achievement in Computer and Electrical Engineering, from Johns Hopkins University (1995). He holds appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Reasearch in Electronics and Applied Physics
Research Areas:
Notable Publications:
Centers & Institutes: Joint Quantum Institute, Quantum Technology Center