Physics welcomes three new faculty in fall 2016

September 21, 2016


New faculty, L-R: Anushya Chandran, Chris Grant, and Chris Laumann

This fall we welcome three new assistant professors to the department:

Anushya Chandran joins our condensed matter theory group. She studies quantum mechanical systems in which disorder “localizes” particles, as well as the non-equilibrium behavior of quantum mechanical systems. As a secondary student she earned a Certificate of Merit (All India 92) and went on to attend the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras. Anushya held a Centennial Fellowship at Princeton, where she did her PhD work with Shivaji Sondhi. After graduating, she took a postdoctoral fellowship at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Anushya’s papers are highly cited and she has given over 20 invited talks worldwide, including at Oxford, Cambridge, Illinois, Los Alamos, Harvard, Max Planck Institute Dresden, and the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. In addition, she has organized programs on many-body localization and many-body physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara and at the Perimeter Institute. Anushya looks forward to working with BU condensed matter faculty and students.

Chris Grant is a particle experimentalist who studies neutrinos. It is widely believed that better understanding the neutrino could be key to physics beyond the Standard Model. Chris has played an important role on key experiments investigating fundamental properties of the neutrino. For his doctoral work at the University of Alabama, Chris worked to perfect the KamLAND experiment in Japan to carefully measure the flux of neutrinos from the Sun. As a Nuclear Science and Security Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow and Fermilab Intensity Frontier Fellow at UC Davis, Chris worked first on the Double-Chooz experiment to precisely measure the neutrino mixing effect. More recently he has been working on the SNO+ experiment in Canada and the CAPTAIN and DUNE experiments based at Fermilab. Chris already has 17 publications with over 650 citations. At BU, Chris has a particular interest in mentoring undergraduate and graduate students.

Chris Laumann also joins our condensed matter theory group. His work examines the fundamental quantum mechanical nature of the universe, particularly how that nature manifests itself in the dynamics of systems and in quantum information processing. He was a member of the 1998 US Physics Olympiad Team and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude with a double major in physics and mathematics from Harvard. Chris was awarded a Marshall Scholarship, enabling him to earn master’s degrees from the University of Edinburgh and Cambridge University. After earning his PhD from Princeton, Chris was named Lawrence Golub Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard. As an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington from 2013-2016, Chris won a Sloan Research Fellowship. He has over 35 publications, including 10 in Physical Review Letters. Chris looks forward to working with students and colleagues on research in quantum many-body phenomena and quantum information processing.