Field of Study USA: Physics Education

Arunava Gupta

Dr. Arunava Gupta is a distinguished university professor emeritus at the University of Alabama and an adjunct professor in the Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the University of California San Diego. He earned his MSc in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and his PhD in chemical physics from Stanford University. Before joining the University of Alabama as faculty in 2004, Dr. Gupta served as a research staff member and manager at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, where he led projects on thin-film and device technologies.

His research focuses on the design, synthesis, and characterization of advanced thin-film and nanomaterials for IT and energy applications. Dr. Gupta has authored more than 450 peer-reviewed articles, holds 30 U.S. patents, and is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Physical Society (APS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2010, he received the Humboldt Research Award for his sustained contributions to the study of magnetism and superconductivity in oxide-based materials.

Carsten A. Ullrich

Dr. Carsten Ullrich is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Missouri. He obtained his PhD in theoretical physics in 1995 from the University of Würzburg, Germany, under the supervision of Professor E.K.U. Gross, and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with Professor Walter Kohn (winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). In 2001, he joined the University of Missouri as an assistant professor; in 2007, he received tenure; and in 2013, was promoted to full professor of physics. Dr. Ullrich’s main area of research is in theoretical and computational condensed-matter physics; specifically, he is interested in describing light–matter interactions and magnetic excitations using first-principles quantum mechanical approaches. For this purpose, he develops and uses methodologies based on the density functional theory. He has authored over 120 journal publications and a textbook on time-dependent density functional theory. In 2015, he was named a fellow of the American Physical Society.