2026 Pappalardo Fellowships in Physics Symposium
2026 Pappalardo Fellowships in Physics Symposium
I was recently invited to give a public-lecture-style talk at this year's Pappalardo Fellowships in Physics Symposium. It was a great chance to share my team's recent Nature paper reporting how we chemically designed moiré superlattices in bulk crystals and how we used these newly discovered "moiré crystals" to access higher-dimensional physics in the lab. I feel incredibly grateful to have had the support of the Pappalardo Fellowship and the MIT community these past three years to make this exciting work possible!
kpn (at) mit.edu
Hi there! I'm a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellow in Physics, working with Prof. Joe Checkelsky and his group at MIT. I received my PhD in physics from Princeton University in 2023, working with Prof. Ali Yazdani and his group. I also received BAs in physics and applied mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2017.
I'm an experimental condensed matter physicist studying the electronic, magnetic, and thermodynamic properties of quantum materials.
My long-term goal is to understand the emergent quantum laws of strongly interacting electron systems, with a particular focus on how they produce exotic superconducting states and correlation-driven topological phases in materials.
My teammates and I have a new paper in Nature! We discovered tunable bulk crystal analogues of 2D moiré materials, which can be synthesized using the tools of solid-state chemistry. We then used these new "moiré crystal" lattices to coerce electrons into simulating the electronic and magnetic properties of a 4-dimensional metal. I'm excited to share our team's findings through this Nature paper, our open-access arXiv posting, and through this talk!