Natalia Perkins

Natalia Perkins is a Professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Minnesota. She is a theoretical condensed matter physicist, and investigates properties of materials from a fundamental microscopic basis. She is particularly interested in phenomena observed in magnetic materials. Her work develops and analyzes microscopic models of electronic systems with strong interplay between charge, spin, orbital degrees of freedom, and geometric frustration. Perkins seeks to understand unconventional quantum phases in correlated materials, like quantum spin liquids. This is an exciting area of condensed matter physics with rapidly evolving fundamental concepts, discoveries of materials with intriguingly novel behaviors and high promise for useful applications.

Perkins received her M.S. in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics from Moscow State University, Russia, and graduated with honors in 1994. She received her Ph.D. in Theoretical Condensed matter Physics at the Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia) in 1997. From 1997 to 2008, she was a Senior Researcher at the Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia. She conducted postdoctoral research at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Frascati, Italy (2002-2004); at the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany (2004-2006); and at the Technische Universitat Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany (2006-2007).

Perkins was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. In 2017, she became an Emmy Noether Fellow at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada.