Shaffique Adam

Shaffique Adam is a Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis.
His research explores how electrons behave in surprising ways when shaped by quantum mechanics, material imperfections, confined geometries, and interactions with one another. He seeks to uncover the physical mechanisms behind technologically important materials including semiconductor quantum dots, magnetic nanoparticles, transition metal dichalcogenides, and graphene.

Shaffique has published more than 100 papers in leading journals, including Nature (3), Science (1), Nature Physics (3), PNAS (2), Physical Review Letters (11), Nature Communications (4), and Science Advances (3). In more than half of these, he is the lead author or the lead theoretical author.

Select Awards

2024 – Dean's Distinguished Professorial Scholar, Washington University
2023 – Dean's Chair, National University of Singapore
2021 – Fellow, Institute of Physics, Singapore
2020 – Singapore NRF Investigator Award
2018 – Institute of Physics, Singapore, World Scientific Medal and Award (top research honor)
2015 – NUS Young Investigator Award
2012 – Singapore NRF Fellowship Award
2009 – U.S. National Research Council Research Fellowship
2004 – Cornell Center for Nanoscale Systems Graduate Research Fellowship
2000 – Cornell University Fellowship (awarded to the top 10% of incoming graduate students)

Select Publications

S. Das Sarma, S. Adam, E. H. Hwang, and E. Rossi, Electronic transport in two-dimensional graphene, Rev. Mod. Phys. 83, 407 (2011). This landmark review synthesized the theory of disorder, screening, and interactions in graphene, establishing the microscopic framework for electronic transport in two-dimensional Dirac systems. It has become the definitive reference (>4000 citations) guiding both experimental and theoretical advances in the field.
J. Jung, A. DaSilva, A. H. MacDonald, and S. Adam, Origin of band gaps in graphene on hexagonal boron nitride, Nat. Commun. 6, 6308 (2015). This paper showed that observed band gaps in aligned graphene/BN heterostructures result from the interplay of lattice relaxation and electron–electron exchange. It was also the first to apply the local stacking approximation for relaxation in twisted 2D materials.
H.-K. Tang, J. Leaw, J. Rodrigues, I. Herbut, P. Sengupta, F. Assaad, and S. Adam, The role of electron–electron interactions in two-dimensional Dirac fermions, Science 361, 570 (2018). We combined quantum Monte Carlo and renormalization group methods to map how Coulomb interactions reshape Dirac semimetals. The work explained long-standing puzzles such as graphene’s enhanced Fermi velocity and how the short-range and long-range components of Coulomb interaction conspire to make graphene appear weakly interacting.
C. Tan, D. Y. H. Ho, L. Wang, J. Li, I. Yudhistira, D. A. Rhodes, T. Taniguchi, K. Watanabe, K. Shepard, P. McEuen, C. R. Dean, S. Adam, and J. Hone, Dissipation-enabled hydrodynamic conductivity in a tunable bandgap semiconductor, Sci. Adv. 8, eabi8481 (2022). This joint theory–experiment study demonstrated ambipolar hydrodynamic transport in bilayer graphene, validating predictions of dissipation-enabled hydrodynamic conductivity. Our theoretical framework for a hydrodynamic metal-to-insulator transition quantitatively unified conductivity across densities, gaps, and temperatures, establishing bilayer graphene as a model hydrodynamic conductor.
M. M. Al Ezzi, G. N. Pallewela, C. De Beule, E. J. Mele, and S. Adam, Analytical model for atomic relaxation in twisted moiré materials, Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 266201 (2024). This work introduced the first fully analytical model of atomic relaxation in moiré bilayers, benchmarked against million-atom simulations. Our theory clarified how lattice relaxation reshapes electronic bands and provided a simple extension to continuum models of moiré systems.
L. Peng, G. Vignale, and S. Adam, Many-body perturbation theory for moiré systems, Phys. Rev. B 112, 075146 (2025), Editor’s Selection. We developed a Green’s-function-based many-body perturbation theory for moiré materials, extending beyond Hartree–Fock approaches. By incorporating GW corrections, the work provided a systematic framework for treating correlations and symmetry breaking in magic-angle graphene.

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