Research Areas:
Theoretical Chemistry, Condensed Matter Physics, Quantum Information Theory and Quantum Many-Particle Systems

Prof. Garnet Chan received his PhD in Theoretical Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 2000. He did his postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Cambridge. He was faculty at Cornell University from 2004 to 2012 and at Princeton University from 2012 to 2016. He is currently Bren Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.

Prof. Chan’s research lies at the interface of theoretical chemistry, condensed matter physics, and quantum information theory, and is concerned with the phenomena and numerical methods associated with quantum many-particle systems. Some current systems of interest include metalloenzymes and biological catalysts, transition metal oxides and superconductivity, and organic molecular crystals and light harvesting. He has contributed to a wide range of quantum simulation methods, including density matrix renormalization and tensor network algorithms for real materials, downfolding through canonical transformations, local quantum chemistry methods, quantum embeddings including dynamical mean-field theory and density matrix embedding theory, and new quantum Monte Carlo techniques.

Prof. Chan received numerous awards including the Simons Investigator in Theoretical Physics Award, the William O. Baker Award from the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry, the Medal of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is also a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.