Timothy Berkelbach was named a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in 2016. His research focuses on understanding and predicting the electronic and optical properties of nanoscale materials, especially anisotropic, layered, and low-dimensional semiconductors. His findings apply to the areas of chemical sensing, information storage and computing, and alternative energy.
A theoretical chemist, Berkelbach is a principal investigator examining interfaces of physical chemistry, condensed-matter physics, and materials science. He conducts much of his work through the James Franck Institute. His research has been published in Nature Physics, Nature Materials, Physical Review Letters, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Since joining the University of Chicago faculty, Berkelbach has been named an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science.
Berkelbach graduated with bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and physics from New York University. He earned a PhD in physical chemistry from Columbia University, where he was a US Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Research Fellow and was honored with the Louis Hammett Award for Excellence in Graduate Research.