Peering into the Secret Life of Electrons

Ali Yazdani is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University and co-director of the Princeton Quantum Initiative. Yazdani is known for his research in advancing our understanding of emergent quantum phenomena by application and development of high-resolution microscopy techniques to directly visualize highly entangled quantum states of matter.

He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in physics and from Stanford University in 1995 with a Ph.D. in applied physics. After working as a postdoctoral scientist at the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), he started his own independent research group at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign before joining the Princeton University’s Physics Department in 2005. He has held visiting professorships at Stanford and at Cambridge University (Trinity College) in the UK and has been a Loeb Lecturer at Harvard. For his research accomplishments, Yazdani has been recognized by several awards and honors including a Humboldt research award and has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2022, he was named co-winner of the 2023 Oliver E. Buckley Prize by the American Physical Society. Yazdani has advised more 30 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.