The Quantum-Steampunk Laboratory Theoretical-physics research group of Nicole Yunger Halpern
Nicole Yunger Halpern, Principal Investigator
- PhD, California Institute of Technology, 2018
- MSc, Perimiter Institute, 2013
- BA, Dartmouth College, 2011
Nicole Yunger Halpern is a Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland.
Nicole earned her Bachelors at Dartmouth College, where she graduated as a co-valedictorian of her class. As a Perimeter Scholars International (PSI) student, she completed her master’s at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Nicole earned her physics PhD under John Preskill’s auspices at the Caltech. Her PhD dissertation won the international Ilya Prigogine Prize for a thermodynamics PhD thesis. As an ITAMP Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard, she received the International Quantum Technology Emerging Researcher Award. She has received also the U.S. ASPIRE Prize for young scientists, the Mary Somerville Medal, the Hermann Weyl Prize for understanding physics through symmetries, the Katharine B. Gebbie Young Investigator Award, and the Early-Career-Scientist Prize in Statistical Physics. Additionally, Nicole has been included in the Science News “SN 10: Ten to Watch List” of early and mid-career scientists.
Nicole is the author of the book Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow, which won the PROSE Award for Popular Science and Mathematics. Yunger Halpern has also published one blog post per month on Quantum Frontiers, the blog of Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, for over ten years.
If you’re wondering what Nicole’s last name (family name, or surname) is, you’re not the first. It’s “Yunger Halpern,” consisting of two parts separated by a space, not a hyphen. The “Yunger” contains no o.