David Awschalom

Prof. David Awschalom is the Liew Family Professor and Vice Dean for Research of the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and Founding Director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. He is also the inaugural Director of Q-NEXT, one of the US DOE Quantum Information Science Research Centers. He works in the fields of spintronics and quantum information engineering, exploring and controlling the spins of electrons, nuclei, and photons in semiconductors and molecules. His research includes implementations of information processing with potential applications in quantum computing, communication, and sensing.

Professor Awschalom received his BSc in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his PhD in experimental physics from Cornell University. He was a research staff member and manager of the Nonequilibrium Physics Department at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. In 1991 he joined the University of California-Santa Barbara as a professor of physics, and in 2001 was additionally appointed as a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Prior to joining PME, he served as the Peter J. Clarke Professor and Director of the California NanoSystems Institute, and director of the Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation.

Professor Awschalom received the American Physical Society Oliver Buckley Prize and Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize, the European Physical Society Europhysics Prize, the Materials Research Society David Turnbull Award and Outstanding Investigator Prize, the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the International Magnetism Prize from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the European Academy of Sciences.