Yong-Baek Kim

Yong-Baek Kim is a theoretical physicist who investigates the origins of emergent quantum phases in strongly interacting many-particle quantum matter. His main contributions include theory of quantum spin liquids in quantum materials with strong spin-orbit coupling and theoretical proposals for experimental detection of novel quasiparticles in topologically-ordered quantum phases, which may become useful for future quantum technologies. Yong-Baek was born and grew up in South Korea. He completed his undergraduate education at the Seoul National University in Seoul and M.Sc. at the POSTECH in Pohang. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his Ph.D., following which he was a postdoctoral member in the theory group at the Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. He was an Assistant Professor at the Pennsylvania State University and the Ohio State University before he moved to the University of Toronto in 2001, where he is now a Professor of Physics and the Director of the Centre for Quantum Materials. He received the Sloan Research Fellowship (1999), National Science Foundation (USA) CAREER award (2000), Brockhouse Medal (2017), Killam Research Fellowship (2018), Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics (2022), and Guggenheim Fellowship (2022). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (since 2022) and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (since 2012).