AP Alums Win National Society Awards

10/12/2020
Departments: Applied Physics

Two Applied Physics graduate student alums, Irfan Siddiqi and Elie Track, were recently selected for prestigious awards by national societies.

Siddiqi was honored with the Joseph F. Keithley Award for Advances in Measurement Science by the American Physical Society. Siddiqi was cited for his “fundamental advances in superconducting parametric amplifiers, including the development of the Josephson traveling wave parametric amplifier, and for their application to quantum measurement and control.”

Irfan Siddiqi received a Ph.D. (2002) in Applied Physics from Yale University (current Applied Physics faculty member Dan Prober was his advisor). He then continued on doing his research at the Applied Physics Department as a postdoctoral researcher with Michel Devoret’s & Rob Schoelkopf’s groups. Currently, Irfan Siddiqi is a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the director of the Quantum Systems Accelerator a US Department of Energy funded national quantum center led by LBNL, and the Advanced Quantum Testbed at LBNL that focuses on state-of-the-art superconducting quantum computing technologies.

Elie Track was selected to receive the 2020 IEEE Max Swerdlow Award for Sustained Service to the Applied Superconductivity Community. In particular, Track was cited:

  • for his over three decades of successful, insightful leadership in the field of applied superconductivity at the intersection of basic science, materials development and device technology
  • for his sustained service and leadership contributions to the IEEE Council on Superconductivity, the Applied Superconductivity Conference and the IEEE Rebooting Computing Initiative; and,
  • for his long and continuing activities as an ambassador and advocate for the field of applied superconductivity at the local, national, and international level.

Track graduated with a Ph.D. from Yale Applied Physics in 1988 (like Siddiqi, Track is also an alum of Dan Prober’s research group). He is a founder and CEO of nVizix LLC, a company that focuses on developing and commercializing a new high-efficiency vacuum solar cell.