The Speakers

Hae-Young Kee

Professor, Department of Physics, University of Toronto

Professor Kee received her Ph.D. in physics from Seoul National University. She completed two postdoctoral positions at Rutgers University & Bell Laboratories and the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining the faculty of the University of Toronto in 2001. She has been a member of the CIFAR-QM program since 2001. In 2011, she became a full professor at the University of Toronto. Professor Kee's group studies emergent phenomena in complex quantum materials, including frustrated magnetic systems, topological materials, high-temperature superconductors, and electronic nematic liquids. As one of the leading theoretical physicists in the field, she will give a lecture about the recent progress on material realizations of the Kitaev model.

Fazel Tafti

Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, Boston College

Fazel Tafti completed his undergraduate studies at Tehran University, Iran before immigrating to Canada. His Ph.D. thesis at the University of Toronto was supervised by Prof. Stephen Julian and focused transport measurements under ultrahigh pressures. He completed two postdoctoral positions, one in physics at the University of Sherbrooke with Prof. Louis Taillefer, and another in chemistry at Princeton University with Prof. Bob Cava. He joined Boston College in 2016 to build a cross-disciplinary research lab at the junction of physics, chemistry, and materials science. Research in Tafti Lab is focused on the design of new quantum materials with specific functions such as magnetocaloric effect, topological superconductivity, long-range entanglement, and tunable magnetic anisotropy.

Vidya Madhavan

Professor, Department of Physics, University of Illinois

Professor Madhavan received her bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering in 1991 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, and a master of technology degree in solid state materials in 1993 from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. She obtained her phD from Boston University in 2000. She held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California, Berkeley from 1999 to 2002, before joining the physics faculty at Boston College in 2002. She joined the faculty at Illinois in 2014 as a full professor.

Sinéad Griffin

Staff Scientist, Materials Science Division and Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Sinéad Griffin received her PhD from ETH Zürich in 2014. From 2015–18 she was an SNF postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, becoming staff scientist in both the Molecular Foundry and the Materials Science Division in 2018. Griffin received the Swiss Physical Society Award for General Physics in 2017 and a Berkeley Lab Early Career LDRD in 2018. She is also actively involved in promoting science in Africa, and since 2010 has lectured throughout the continent as part of the African School on Electronic Structure: Theory and Applications (ASESMA). Her research uses a combination of analytical and computational methods to understand, manipulate and design functional properties in quantum materials.

Brad Ramshaw

Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, Cornell University

Brad Ramshaw was born in Canada where he completed his undergraduate studies and PhD in 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Doug Bonn and Prof. Walter Hardy at University of British Columbia in the field of cuprate superconductors. He moved to the US for a postdoctoral appointment at the pulsed magnetic field lab at Los Alamos National Labs where he continues to study quantum oscillations in cuprates and learns about ultrasound techniques. He becomes Assistant Professor at Cornell University in 2016 where his group focuses on quantum materials such as high-temperature superconductors, quantum-critical metals, and topological semimetals. Ramshaw group's techniques cover from electrical transport and torque magnetometry, to symmetry-sensitive ultrasonic techniques. Pr Ramshaw has been a CIFAR Global scholar since 2020.

Andrew Lucas

Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, University of Colorado

Andrew Lucas completed his undergraduate studies bachelor's degree from Stanford University before obtaining his PhD from Harvard University in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Subir Sachdev. He held a postdoctoral appointment at Stanford University from 2016 to 2019 and joined University of Colorado as an Assistant Professor in 2019. His group's work spans multiple disciplines of theoretical and mathematical physics, including condensed matter, hydrodynamics, high energy physics, atomic physics and quantum information.

Christopher Gutiérrez

Assistant Professor, University of California Los Angeles

Christopher Gutiérrez completed an undergraduate degree in math and physics at UCLA before obtaining an M.S. in physics at California State University and a Ph.D. in Physics at Columbia University in 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Pasupathy. He has held postdocs with Prof. Stroscio at the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, NIST as well as Prof. Damascelli at the University of British Columbia.

In 2020 Christopher returned to his Alma Mater UCLA as an assistant professor, where he aims to push the understanding of the origins of emergent behaviour in quantum materials by custom designing novel quantum states using a host of innovative in situ design techniques, including nanoscale patterning and physical strain. An avid artist as well as a scientist, Christopher heavily utilizes his experience in Adobe Illustrator and Blender to enhance his scientific communication. His scientific illustrations have been featured on the covers of both Nature Physics and Science.

Brian Skinner

Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, The Ohio State University

Brian Skinner completed an undergraduate degree in physics and mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech, followed by a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Minnesota in 2007. Brian held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Minnesota, Argonne National Lab as well as MIT.

In 2019, he became an assistant Professor at Ohio State University, where he runs a condensed matter theory group. His group works closely with experimentalists to study Dirac and Weyl semimetals, twisted-bilayer graphene, among others. As a theorist, he also applies condensed matter concepts to settings outside of physics, ranging from quantum information to the dynamic of human groups. Brian also runs a physics blog "Gravity and Levity" where he discusses to a lay audience some of the big ideas in physics.

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