We are delighted to announce that Professor Narang received The American Physical Society’s 2023 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award.
The Maria Goeppert Mayer Award recognizes and enhances outstanding achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career, and provides opportunities for her to present these achievements to others through public lectures in the spirit of theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics Maria Goeppert Mayer.
The citation for Narang reads “For pioneering the development of ab initio computational physics approaches to light-matter coupling and non-equilibrium dynamics and their application to the understanding, prediction and design of quantum materials.”
Understanding and controlling dynamics in quantum matter is one of the 21st century’s grand challenges. Correlations and the interplay between charge, spin, orbital, and lattice degrees of freedom give rise to collective states in quantum matter. Narang’s group is creating computational physics approaches to predict new states and collective modes of quantum matter when the system is driven far out-of-equilibrium. Narang will deliver her Maria Goeppert Mayer lectures in 2023 on topics in nonequilibrium physics of quantum matter. She joins previous UCLA winner of the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, Prof. Andrea Ghez, who received this honor in 1999.