Biography

Dr. David Awschalom is the Liew Family Professor and Vice Dean of the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and Director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. He is also the inaugural director of Q-NEXT, one of the US Department of Energy Quantum Information Science Research Centers. Before arriving in Chicago, he was the Director of the California NanoSystems Institute and Professor of Physics, Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California – Santa Barbara, and previously a Research Staff Member and Manager at the IBM Watson Research Center. He works in spintronics and quantum information engineering, studying the quantum states of electrons, nuclei, and photons in semiconductors and molecules for quantum information processing. Awschalom received the APS Oliver Buckley Prize and Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize, the EPS Europhysics Prize, the MRS 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 Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and the European Academy of Sciences.