Brad Ramshaw, associate professor of physics in the College of Arts & Sciences, has been named to the 2025 class of Brown Investigators. Each investigator, recognized for curiosity-driven research in chemistry or physics, will receive up to $2 million over five years.
The awardee cohort, the second to be selected by the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, includes eight distinguished midcareer faculty working on fundamental challenges in the physical sciences, particularly those with potential long-term practical applications in chemistry and physics.
The grant will support Ramshaw’s work developing a new technique using ultrasound to probe the electronic states of atomically thin materials.
“The world of two-dimensional materials has exploded over the past decade, but the development of suitable experimental techniques for measuring them has not kept up,” Ramshaw said. “This grant will allow us to pursue some high-risk, novel ideas for how to measure material properties like elasticity and high-frequency conductivity that have previously been inaccessible in 2D materials.”
Ramshaw and colleagues in his lab design and build unique experiments to probe the fundamental properties of quantum materials – systems that exhibit nontrivial quantum phenomena. He specializes in taking traditional techniques, like ultrasound and electrical and thermal transport, and making them smaller and faster using modern high-speed electronics and micro- and nanofabrication techniques.
His current research topics include searching for topological superconductors, exploring Planckian dissipation and the strange metal phase of high-Tc superconductors, probing electron and phonon interactions in the hydrodynamic limit and developing new techniques to look for gapless excitations in quantum spin liquids.
Ramshaw received a bachelor of science degree in physics and computer science and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of British Columbia. Before coming to Cornell in 2017, he held positions as a postdoctoral researcher and staff scientist at Los Alamos National labs in the National High Magnetic Field Lab.
Linda B. Glaser is news and media relations manager in the College of Arts and Sciences.
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