Postdoctoral researcher Wei-Cheng Lee has been selected for the prestigious Michelson Postdoctoral Prize Lectureship at Case Western Reserve University and has been invited to present three technical lectures and a colloquium at Case Western in Fall 2013.
Lee, who joined the Department of Physics in 2010, works in condensed matter theory alongside Professors Philip Phillips and Anthony Leggett. His research, which is supported by the Center for Emergent Superconductivity, is focused on unconventional superconductors and Mott systems. Most recently, he has studied the effects of orbital degrees of freedom on high-temperature iron-based superconductors, which were first discovered in 2008, using various theoretical techniques like generalized RPA and multidimensional bosonization.
"Wei-Cheng is a highly productive and valuable member of our research team," shared Phillips. "He is particularly noted for the idea, now well accepted in the field, that orbital ordering underlies the transport anisotropies in strontium ruthenate and iron-based superconductors."
Lee said it has been a tremendous experience to study superconductivity at Illinois: “The department is famous for this area of research—I feel honored to be here. In addition to my colleagues working in theoretical physics, I have also enjoyed my collaboration with Professor Laura Greene. Her team has performed experiments that gave me a lot of inspirations and demonstrated that several novel features observed in the point contact spectroscopy are in fact associated with the orbital degrees of freedom, as predicted.”
Lee also maintains collaborations with scientists at the Material Science Division of the Argonne National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Lee received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the National Taiwan University in 1999 and 2002 respectively. He earned his doctoral degree in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008, working under Professor Allan MacDonald. There, he was awarded the University Continuing Fellowship, one of the highest honors to UT graduate students, and selected for the Outstanding Dissertation in Physics award. From 2008 to 2010, Lee worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, under Professor Congjun Wu, before coming to Physics Illinois in 2010.