Caltech Announces Eight Recipients of the 2025 National Brown Investigator Award

Each investigator, recognized for curiosity-driven research in chemistry or physics, will receive up to $2 million over five years.

PASADENA, Calif., May 19, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech today announced the 2025 class of Brown Investigators. The cohort, the second to be selected through the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences, comprises eight distinguished mid-career faculty working on fundamental challenges in the physical sciences, particularly those with potential long-term practical applications in chemistry and physics. Each investigator will receive up to $2 million over five years.

The Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech, established in 2023 through a $400-million gift to the Institute from entrepreneur, philanthropist, and alumnus Ross M. Brown (BS '56, MS '57), seeks to advance fundamental science discoveries with the potential to seed breakthroughs that benefit society—a goal it shares with Caltech.

"Mid-career faculty are at a time in their careers when they are poised and prepared to make profound contributions to their fields," Brown says, "My continuing hope is that the resources provided by the Brown Investigator Awards will allow them to pursue riskier innovative ideas that extend beyond their existing research efforts and align with new or developing passions, especially during this time of funding uncertainty."

The 2025 investigators are:

Dmitry Abanin, Professor of Physics, Princeton University, to develop a new theoretical and computational framework to describe the emergent properties of quantum materials and synthetic quantum systems away from thermal equilibrium.

László Kürti, Professor of Chemistry, Rice University, to invent chemical strategies for constructing stable neutral polynitrogen cages—molecules made entirely from nitrogen atoms that store extraordinary energy. These elusive structures remain intact under ambient conditions yet release energy on demand without combustion and decompose cleanly into hot nitrogen gas, offering a revolutionary platform for propulsion and energy storage.  

Mark Levin, Associate Professor of Chemistry, University of Chicago, to translate lessons learned from skeletal editing of aromatic compounds (stable chemicals with a flat ring structure) to reactions with aliphatic compounds (three-dimensional, more reactive chemicals), with the goal of providing access to unusual compounds that are inaccessible using traditional chemical synthesis. 

Brad Ramshaw, Associate Professor of Physics, Cornell University, to develop a new technique using ultrasound to probe the electronic states of atomically thin materials.

Cindy Regal, Professor of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, and Baur-SPIE Chair at JILA, to demonstrate quantum entanglement—a connection between particles like photons or atoms that persists despite their physical distance—with objects of larger mass than have been entangled before.

Xavier Roy, Professor of Chemistry, Columbia University, to design and explore materials in which electrons face competing pathways for motion, giving rise to complex behaviors that, if controlled, could enable new kinds of quantum technologies.

Hailiang Wang, Professor of Chemistry, Yale University, to expand electrocatalysis to convert inorganic waste molecules, such as CO2 and NOx, into valuable and functional organic compounds containing multiple carbon–carbon and carbon–nitrogen bonds.

Joel Yuen-Zhou, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC San Diego, for theoretical and computational work to utilize the sensitivity of some chemical reactions to the spin of the electron in photoredox catalysis to make the reaction select one of two enantiomers (mirror-image forms of compounds).

Brown established the Investigator Awards in 2020 through the Brown Science Foundation in support of the belief that "scientific discovery is a driving force in the improvement of the human condition," according to its news release from the Science Philanthropy Alliance, which helped guide Brown in realizing his philanthropic vision.

"We're delighted to partner with Ross Brown and the members of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences to identify and support outstanding investigators in fundamental chemistry and physics," says Caltech Provost David A. Tirrell, Carl and Shirley Larson Provostial Chair and Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.

A total of 21 investigators were recognized in the first four years of the program, including eight in the 2024 class, the first cohort to be installed under the auspices of the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech.

Previous awardees include MIT's Nuh Gedik, who is developing a new kind of microscopy that images electrons photo-emitted from a surface while also measuring their energy and momentum; Kerri A. Pratt from the University of Michigan, for research to discover the chemical compounds and chemical mechanisms that define the composition of the Arctic's atmosphere, which is warming faster than elsewhere on Earth; Andrea Young of UC Santa Barbara, who is using novel fabrication techniques to make new kinds of qubits, the quantum computing analog of classical bits, in two-dimensional materials; Columbia University's Tanya Zelevinsky, who studies spectroscopy of cold molecules for fundamental physics; Princeton University's Waseem Bakr, who works with ultracold quantum gases to realize scalable architectures for quantum computation, and Robert Knowles, whose research will explore a novel hypothesis for the evolution of homochirality—the presence in nature of only one of two mirror-image forms of biomolecules. Caltech's David Hsieh, Donald A. Glaser Professor of Physics and executive officer for physics, was among two inaugural recipients of the award in 2020.

Brown Investigators from all cohorts are invited to an annual meeting that offers opportunities to share ideas. The second annual meeting was held at Caltech in February 2025.

To determine the new cohort, a select number of research universities from across the country were invited to nominate faculty members who had earned tenure within the last 10 years and who are doing innovative fundamental research in the physical sciences. Nominees were then evaluated by an independent scientific review board that recommended grant winners. In administering the program, Caltech refrains from nominating its own scientists for Brown Investigator Awards. In return, the Institute draws other funds from the Brown gift to support fundamental research in chemistry and physics.

SOURCE Caltech