Prineha Narang awarded NSF CAREER Award

Prineha Narang, Assistant Professor of Computational Materials Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been selected to receive a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The award is one of the most prestigious for early career faculty in science and engineering.

Narang’s group designs materials at the smallest scale, using single atoms, to enable the leap to quantum technologies. The award will support Narang’s investigation of error-corrected solid-state quantum repeaters — devices that can hold and process quantum information and couple it to photons. These devices are an essential component of large-scale quantum networks. 

“My goal is to chart an entirely new approach with theory-driven first-principles modeling and discovery of solid-state quantum systems,” Narang said. “I’m interested in how we can directly engineer the structure-function relationships that govern specific quantum behaviors — think  atom-by-atom engineering of matter.”

Narang joined the SEAS faculty in 2017. Before joining SEAS, Narang was a Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and a Research Scholar in Condensed Matter Theory in the MIT Department of Physics. She holds an S.M and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where she worked on light-matter interactions.

Narang is also a Moore Inventor Fellow named by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for innovations in quantum science and technology, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review (MIT TR35), and a Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum in 2018.