Narang, Prineha

Short Biography

Dr. Prineha Narang is a Professor and the Howard Reiss Chair in Physical Sciences at UCLA, as well as a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Prior to moving to UCLA, she was an Assistant Professor of Computational Materials Science at Harvard University. Before starting on the Harvard faculty in 2017, Dr. Narang was an Environmental Fellow at HUCE, and worked as a research scholar in condensed matter theory in the Department of Physics at MIT. She received an M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech. Her group works on theoretical and computational quantum materials, non-equilibrium dynamics, and transport in quantum matter. Narang’s work has been recognized by many awards and special designations, including the 2023 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award from the American Physical Society, 2022 Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award from the Materials Research Society, Mildred Dresselhaus Prize, Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Max Planck Award from the Max Planck Society, and the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics all in 2021, an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, being named a Moore Inventor Fellow by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review (MIT TR35). Narang has organized several symposia and workshops, most recently at the APS March Meeting on “Materials for Quantum Information Science”. Her continued service to the community includes chairing the Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring Meeting (2022) and the MRS-Kavli Foundation Future of Materials Workshop: Computational Materials Science (2021), as an Associate Editor at ACS Nano, organizing APS, Optica (OSA), and SPIE symposia, and a leadership role in APS’ Division of Materials Physics. Outside of science, she is an avid triathlete and runner.