Professor Prineha Narang receives the 2023 Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award from Iota Sigma Pi, the National Honor Society for Women in Chemistry. The award is given for research achievement to a woman chemist or biochemist not over forty years of age.
According to Iota Sigma PI, Narang was selected for the award in recognition of her very impressive, groundbreaking, and interdisciplinary work, which has importance in both the core understanding of matter and a wide range of practical applications, as well as impacting areas of chemistry, physics, materials science, astronomy, and others.
Narang joined the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry faculty in July, 2022 as the Howard Reiss Development Chair. 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.
Narang’s interdisciplinary group works on theoretical and computational quantum materials, non-equilibrium dynamics, and quantum information science.
Narang’s work has been recognized by many awards and special designations, including the 2023 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award from the American Physical Society, 2023 ONR Young Investigator Award, 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 Sabbatical 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, a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review (MIT TR35) and a leading young scientist by the World Economic Forum in 2018. In 2017, she was named by Forbes Magazine on their “30under30” list for her work in atom-by-atom quantum engineering, that is, designing materials at the smallest scale, using single atoms, to enable the leap to quantum technologies.
Narang is the third UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry faculty member to receive the Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award. Professor Robin Garrell received the award in 1996 and Ellen Sletten in 2022.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
