Ali Yazdani MS, PhD

Ali Yazdani is the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He studies correlated and topological quantum phenomena in materials, in particular focusing on direct visualization of such quantum phenomena using atomic-scale tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. He was born in Tehran, Iran, and lived there before emigrating to California in the early '80s. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in physics and received a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford University in 1995. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Yazdani started his career as a faculty member at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. In 2005, he joined the faculty in Princeton University's Department of Physics. Yazdani also serves as the director of the Princeton Center for Complex Materials. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, American Association for Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.