This year, thirty-four new faculty enrich the College of Arts & Sciences with creative ideas in a vast array of topics, including quantum materials, artificial intelligence, moral psychology and misinformation, adding to the College’s collaborative and interdisciplinary nexus of discovery and impact.

Multiple scientists working at the quantum scale joined the College. Physicist Xiaomeng Liu creates quantum materials in his lab and investigates their properties, including performing high-resolution imaging using a quantum microscope. His current focus is on 2D materials -- crystals made of a single layer of atoms, such as graphene.

Physicist Nils Deppe also investigates the quantum realm, in the new frontier of gravitational waves. He’s part of the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) collaboration, providing high-accuracy predictions of what gravitational wave observatories like LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detect.

Also in physics Eric Robert Dufresne, with a joint appointment in Materials Science and Engineering, studies biologically-inspired materials design and materials of life. His aim is to reveal novel physical principles that living organisms use to organize molecules into functional nanoscale structures and incorporate them in synthetic systems.

The College’s historic leadership in accelerator physics continues with the appointment of Nigel Lockyer as director of the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based ScienceS and Education (CLASSE), overseeing Cornell’s particle accelerator facilities, research and education. He’ll be pursuing new technology for accelerators with colleagues at Cornell.

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.