Taylor Hughes receives National Science Foundation CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Taylor Hughes has been awarded a 2014 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) is among NSF’s most prestigious awards, conferred annually in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars by integrating outstanding research with excellent education, and by showing great promise for a lifetime of leadership within their respective fields.

Hughes will use the 5-year grant to explore the relationship between topology and geometry in electron systems, with the goal of predicting new, robust phenomena in real materials. By adapting ideas from high-energy physics and gravitation to condensed matter physics, Hughes’s theoretical work in this area has the potential to uncover as-yet undiscovered topological transport phenomena that are universal and quantized.

This would transform our understanding of materials with strong spin-orbit coupling, including topological insulators, topological Weyl semi-metals, and spin-orbit coupled semiconductor heterostructures/quantum wires, with implications for incorporating quantum phenomena into unique devices. Along with the study of realistic materials, there are deep conceptual issues that would be resolved regarding the relationship between topological transport, the geometry of elastic deformations, and quantum field theory.

This work will additionally integrate undergraduates into cutting-edge research, and will train undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in communication and research skills that will benefit their future careers.

Hughes is a recipient of the 2014 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research from the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and of a 2013 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He is a member of the Institute of Condensed Matter Theory and of the US Department of Energy’s Quantum Materials at the Nanoscale research effort headquartered at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Hughes received his bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Florida in 2003, graduating summa cum laude. He then worked for a year as a software engineer for the Department of Defense. He went on to receive his doctoral degree from Stanford University in 2009, working under Shou-Cheng Zhang.

Hughes completed a postdoctoral appointment at Physics Illinois and the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory (2009-2011), working under Professor Eduardo Fradkin. He joined the faculty at Physics Illinois in 2011.

This CAREER grant is supported by NSF’s Division of Materials Research.