New APAM Faculty Members
The APAM Department is pleased to announce the appointment of two new faculty members starting in January 2025.
Michele Simoncelli is a new tenure-track assistant professor in Materials Science and Engineering. Prof. Simoncelli and his group develop the theoretical and computational framework to understand, quantitatively describe, and control quantum transport phenomena in solids and liquids involving, e.g., charge, heat, light and spin, their possible synergies or conflicts, and related macroscopic signatures. The ambition is twofold: first, to evolve current materials for storage and management of information or energy, and second, to innovate on existing applications or even conceive new ones, in collaboration with experimentalists and industry.
Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, he received a master’s degree in Physics of Complex Systems from Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and his PhD from EPFL (Switzerland) in May 2021. From fall 2021 to 2024, he held the Crone Research Fellowship in the Physics Department at the University of Cambridge.
Xueyue (Sherry) Zhang is a new tenure-track assistant professor in Applied Physics. Prof. Zhang and her lab leverage the unique advantages of qubit-photon interactions to advance the frontiers of quantum science and technology. They focus on introducing new capabilities, such as high levels of connectivity, into superconducting circuits and solid-state spin platforms by integrating these qubits with microwave waveguides and silicon photonics. This foundation enables the Zhang lab to explore novel possibilities in basic science, such as many-body quantum simulation and quantum topological photonics, as well as pushing the boundaries of quantum computing and networking technologies.
Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, she earned her Backelor’s with honors in Microelectronics Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2017 and a PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech in 2023. She then joined UC Berkeley as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Physics
