Illinois Physics Professor Taylor Hughes has been named a 2020 Donald Biggar Willett Scholar by The Grainger College of Engineering. Hughes is among XX university faculty selected for the honor this year from across the college.
Hughes is a highly productive condensed matter theorist, whose research has profound implications for applications in electronic materials and engineered meta-materials. Hughes regularly collaborates with experimentalists and theorists in other subdisciplines of physics, to make rapid progress in our understanding of the universe at every scale, and in particular of the fundamental properties and behaviors of exotic quantum phases of matter. He also maintains active collaborations that bridge engineering and scientific disciplines.
Written by Siv Schwink for Illinois Physics
Illinois Physics Professor Taylor Hughes. Photo by L. Brian Stauffer, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Illinois Physics Professor Taylor Hughes has been named a 2020 Donald Biggar Willett Scholar by The Grainger College of Engineering.
Hughes is a highly productive condensed matter theorist, whose research has profound implications for applications in electronic materials and engineered meta-materials. Hughes regularly collaborates with experimentalists and theorists in other subdisciplines of physics, to make rapid progress in our understanding of the universe at every scale, and in particular of the fundamental properties and behaviors of exotic quantum phases of matter. He also maintains active collaborations that bridge engineering and scientific disciplines.
More specifically, Hughes’ research program addresses unanswered questions at the intersection of condensed matter physics, high-energy physics and quantum information science. His primary focus is on topological phases of matter and the interactions between topology and geometry in quantum materials. Hughes has also made impactful contributions to our fundamental understanding of superconductivity, electronic transport, topological order, the quantum Hall effect, disordered electronic systems, many-body quantum entanglement, and theoretical high-energy physics.
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hughes is a member of the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory (ICMT); of the US Department of Energy’s Quantum Materials at the Nanoscale research effort and of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC), both headquartered at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (MRL); and of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center of The Grainger College of Engineering.
Hughes is a recipient of numerous honors. He received a 2015 Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research, a 2014 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the 2014 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and of a 2013 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Hughes is co-author with B. Andrei Bernevig of Topological Insulators and Topological Superconductors, a graduate-level text published by Princeton University Press and the first comprehensive introduction to the subject.
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 Illinois Physics and the ICMT (2009-2011), working under Professor Eduardo Fradkin. He joined the faculty at Illinois Physics in 2011.
The Willett Research Initiatives in Engineering provides support for professorships, undergraduate- and graduate-student research, and related research activity. It honors the memory of Donald Biggar Willett (1897-1981), who attended the University of Illinois from 1916 to 1921.