Ali Yazdani

Ali Yazdani (born 1967) is an American physicist who focuses on understanding new quantum phases of matter. He is currently the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics at Princeton University and the Director of the Princeton Center for Complex Materials, a material research science and technology (MRSEC) center supported by the National Science Foundation. Together with Seamus Davis, he is the recipient of the 2023 Buckley Prize from the American Physical Society.

Yazdani specializes in the development of high-precision quantum microscopy and spectroscopy techniques to directly visualize new quantum states and their wavefunctions with atomic resolution. Among his interests are understanding novel quantum states, such as high-temperature superconductors, and topological and correlated quantum phases, including those that can harbor novel quasi-particles such as Majorana zero modes. He and his research group have developed several new quantum microscopy techniques and instrumentation and operated them in specialized ultra-quiet laboratories at Princeton.

Biography
Yazdani was born in 1967 and raised in Tehran, Iran, prior to immigrating to California, USA. He received his BA in Physics with high honors from UC Berkeley in 1989, and his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University. After a postdoctoral research work with Don Eigler at IBM he went on to be an assistant, associate and then full professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

He moved to Princeton as a professor in 2005 and was named Class of 1909 professor of physics in 2015. He has held visiting positions at Stanford, University of Cambridge, UK (Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, 2019–20) and has been Morris Loeb Lectures at Harvard University in 2018.

Awards and honors

 * Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Investigator since 2008.
 * Fellow of the American Physical Society (2009)
 * Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012)
 * Humboldt Research Award (2014)
 * Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015)
 * Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2019).
 * Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (2023)