Science of the Very, Very Small

Itai Cohen, professor of physics in the College of Arts & Sciences, studies the physics of matter in motion. Since joining Cornell in 2005, his research has focused on building microscopic robots, controlling the shear thickening behavior of microscopic and nanoscopic particles suspended in a fluid, exploring the mechanics of materials ranging from biological tissues to origami-inspired metamaterials, discovering the aerodynamic and neuromuscular mechanisms used by insects during flapping flight, and determining how audiences at heavy metal concerts coordinate their movement. Understanding how emergent behaviors arise from the microscopic rules governing these systems remains one of the biggest challenges in physics.

Professor Cohen received his B.S. in Physics from the University of California at Los Angeles and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. Following his graduate studies, he was a postdoctoral fellow in physics and the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University. Professor Cohen is an NSF career grant recipient and a fellow of the American Physical Society, and he has served as a Feinberg and Braginsky Fellow (2012) and the Rosi and Max Varon Visiting Professor (2021) at the Weizmann Institute. He is also slated to be the van der Waals Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam (2022). Professor Cohen has published over 110 research articles; given nearly 300 invited seminars, colloquia, and conference presentations; and co-authored the book “Finding Your Research Voice: Story Telling and Theater Skills for Bringing Your Presentation to Life.” His work has been covered by various outlets, ranging from the BBC to NPR to The New York Times.

Liliana Colanzi, M.A. ’14, Ph.D. ’17, was born in Bolivia. She has published the short story collections “Permanent Vacations” (2010) and “Our Dead World” (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017), and has edited “La desobediencia, antología de ensayo feminista” (2019). “Our Dead World” has been translated into five languages. She won the Mexican Aura Estrada literary prize in 2015, and the Hay Festival Cartagena included her among the best Latin American writers under 40 (Bogota39, 2017). In 2017, Professor Colanzi started the literary press Dum Dum editora in Bolivia.

Professor Colanzi holds an M.Phil. in Latin American Studies from University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. She is an assistant professor of Latin American literature and creative writing at the Department of Romance Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. Professor Colanzi’s research focuses on popular genres in modern and contemporary Latin American literature (science fiction, horror, the fantastic).

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Złoczów, Poland. Having survived World War II, he came to the U. S. in 1949 and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities. He arrived at Cornell University in 1965 and has taught introductory chemistry half of his time here. Professor Hoffmann is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor, Emeritus, of Chemistry and Biology in the College of Arts & Sciences. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including sharing the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. As a writer, Professor Hoffmann has carved out a land among science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays, five nonfiction books, three plays, and seven published collections of poetry.

Ailong Ke received his B.S. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Biophysics with Cynthia Wolberger from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2002. After a three-year postdoctoral training with Nobel Laureate Dr. Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley, he started his independent career as an assistant professor at Cornell University in 2005 and rose to full professor in 2017. Since coming to Cornell, Professor Ke has been working in the areas of RNA 3’-end processing and degradation, metabolite-sensing riboswitches, and more recently the CRISPR-Cas immunity system. He also strives to apply the mechanistic understanding to genome editing applications in eukaryotic cells. Professor Ke holds key patents in CRISPR-Cas3 and related fields and has published over 50 papers in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Molecular cell, NSMB, PNAS, and RNA. He received the Cornell Provost Research Innovation award in 2018 and the RNA Society Mid-Career award in 2019.

Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics in the College of Arts & Sciences, is one of the leading experts in the theoretical study of emergent phenomena in quantum materials and a pioneer in applying machine learning to quantum materials data. Wielding machine learning tools, she is pushing the envelope of how much theoretical insight can be extracted from complex and big data and how quickly so-obtained theoretical understanding can feedback into experimental decisions. Professor Kim’s group has made a number of groundbreaking advances harnessing the power of machine learning, including the first detection of the universal mechanism of atomic-scale spatial variations in the local density of states in underdoped high-temperature superconductors. She received an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation in 2010 and another Early Career Award from the Department of Energy in 2013. Professor Kim obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005 then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. She was named a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2020.

Julia Markovits, associate professor of philosophy in the College of Arts & Sciences, works on ethics. Professor Markovits has written about questions concerning the nature of moral reasons and about moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, which are the focus of her current book project. Her first book, “Moral Reason,” was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. It defends the view that what we have reason to do depends on what we care about, but we all nonetheless have reason to be moral. Professor Markovits joined the Cornell philosophy faculty in 2014, after spending five years on the philosophy faculty at MIT. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Professor Markovits completed her graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. She teaches courses in bioethics, meta- and normative ethics, and the philosophy of law.

John Marohn earned a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Physics from the University of Rochester, carried out Ph.D. work in chemistry with Daniel P. Weitekamp at the California Institute of Technology, and did postdoctoral work as a U.S. National Research Council Postdoctoral Associate of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1999 and now holds the rank of professor. Professor Marohn is a member of the Cornell Center for Materials Research, serves on the Executive Committee of the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility, and is a member of the Cornell field of materials science and engineering. He organized and chaired two International Kavli Conferences on nano-scale magnetic resonance imaging. In his research, Professor Marohn uses scanned probe microscopes to (1) detect and image electron and nuclear spins with nanometer resolution and (2) image charge generation and transport in solar cells and transistors made from inorganic, organic, and hybrid semiconductors with nanometer spatial resolution and nanosecond temporal resolution. His team’s work has advanced our understanding of non-contact friction, nanoscale electrostatic fluctuations, metal/organic charge injection, electron and ion motion in disordered materials, spin noise, and the ultrasensitive detection of small forces.

Liam McAllister, professor of physics in the College of Arts & Sciences, focuses his research on string theory, which combines quantum mechanics and gravity in a consistent framework. He has found solutions of string theory that describe cosmologies similar to our own universe, and he works to explain observations on the very largest and very smallest scales. Professor McAllister received an A.B. in Physics and Mathematics in 2000 from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Physics in 2005 from Stanford University. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 2009-2011, received an NSF Career Award in 2011, and was a Simons Fellow in 2014.

Brad Ramshaw’s research team specializes in ultrasound, which they use to study new types of superconductors and magnets that will form the basis of future quantum computers. Professor Ramshaw received his Ph.D. in 2012 from the University of British Columbia, where he studied high-temperature superconductors. He then moved to Los Alamos National Labs, where he was a Director’s Fellow Postdoc at the National High Magnetic Field Lab. There, Professor Ramshaw developed experimental techniques to study quantum materials in the strongest magnetic fields available on Earth — up to 100 tesla. Following his postdoc, he spent one year at Los Alamos as a staff scientist; in 2017, he started his lab at Cornell. Professor Ramshaw is the Dick and Dale Ries Johnson Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics in the College of Arts & Sciences. He is the recipient of both the NSF and DOE Early Career Awards, a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, and a Sloan and Kavli Fellow.

Michael Reynolds is a postdoctoral associate in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the College of Engineering, working with Nicholas Abbott, Tisch University Professor in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (Engineering), and Paul McEuen, John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science in the Department of Physics (A&S). He received his B.S. in physics from the University of Oklahoma in 2014 with minors in Latin and mathematics. Dr. Reynolds performed his graduate work with Paul McEuen and received his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in August of 2021. His research focuses on building microscopic actuators and robots.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of “Open Interval,” a 2009 National Book Award finalist, and “Black Swan,” winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as “Poems in Conversation and a Conversation,” a chapbook collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. She is currently at work on “The Coal Tar Colors,” her third poetry collection, and “Purchase,” a collection of essays. She has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca arts collective. Professor Van Clief-Stefanon was one of ten celebrated poets commissioned to write poems inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series in conjunction with the 2015 exhibit “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works” for MoMA.

Peter Wittich is a professor of physics in the College of Arts & Sciences and director of the Laboratory for Elementary-Particle Physics (LEPP), a part of the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-Based Sciences and Education (CLASSE). His research interests lie in particle physics, the energy frontier. Professor Wittich is a collaborator in the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC in Geneva, Switzerland, and a past collaborator in the CDF experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL. He worked on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) research for which Dr. Art McDonald received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics; the collaboration, including Wittich, was awarded the 2015 Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Prize the same year. Professor Wittich’s current research includes evaluating the data collected by CMS for evidence of new physics, such as dark matter or novel properties of the Higgs Boson. He received a B.S. in Physics in 1993 from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Physics in 2000 from the University of Pennsylvania.

Natalie Wolchover is a senior writer and editor at Quanta Magazine covering the physical sciences. She also has bylines in Nature, NewYorker.com, Popular Science, and other publications. Ms. Wolchover has a Bachelor’s in Physics from Tufts University; studied graduate-level physics at the University of California, Berkeley; and co-authored several academic papers in nonlinear optics. Her writing has been featured in “The Best American Science and Nature Writing” and “The Best Writing on Mathematics”; it has won several awards, including the 2016 Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award and the American Institute of Physics 2017 Science Communication Award for Articles. Ms. Wolchover is the Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist in the College of Arts & Sciences for the Spring 2022 semester.