David D. Awschalom was born in 1956 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States. He is an American scientist who studies how materials behave at the smallest levels. He is best known for his research on how electricity and magnetism work together in materials used for electronics.
Awschalom earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He later received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in experimental physics from Cornell University. Currently, he is the director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange and a Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME). Previously, he led the California Nanosystems Institute and taught physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also worked with the electrical and computer engineering department there. His Hirsch number is 96, which shows how many important scientific papers he has published.
Awards and honors
- was chosen as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1992)
- received the Oliver E. Buckley Prize from the American Physical Society (2005)
- received the Agilent Europhysics Prize from the European Physical Society (2005)
- was chosen as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006)
- was selected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2007)
- received the Turnbull Lectureship Award from the Materials Research Society (2010)
- was selected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2011)