Professor David Awschalom is a leading scientist in spintronics and quantum information engineering. He was a research staff member and manager at the IBM Watson Research Center, and then a Professor of Physics and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California-Santa Barbara where he served as the Peter Clarke Director of the California NanoSystems Institute. He is currently the Liew Family Professor in Spintronics and Quantum Information in the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. His research efforts involve understanding and coherently controlling the spins of electrons, ions, and nuclei in the solid state for fundamental studies of quantum systems, as well as potential applications in computing, imaging, and encryption. His group has experimental activities probing optical and magnetic interactions in semiconductor quantum structures, spin dynamics and coherence in condensed matter systems, macroscopic quantum phenomena in nanometer-scale magnets, and implementations of quantum information processing in the solid state. He has developed a variety of femtosecond-resolved spatiotemporal spectroscopies and micromagnetic sensing techniques aimed at exploring charge and spin motion in the quantum domain.

Professor Awschalom received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, the Materials Research Society Outstanding Investigator Prize, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics International Magnetism Prize and Néel Medal, the American Physical Society Oliver E. Buckley Prize, the European Physical Society Europhysics Prize, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the Materials Research Society David Turnbull Award, and the American Physical Society Julius Lilienfeld Prize.  He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Awschalom is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the European Academy of Sciences.