Research Areas:
Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics and Nanoscience

Prof. Steven Louie received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1976 and has been teaching there since 1980. Currently as a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School, Prof. Louie is also a Senior Faculty Scientist in the Materials Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Prof. Louie’s research interests cover mainly theoretical condensed matter physics and nanoscience, which include: electronic and structural properties of crystals, surfaces, interfaces and clusters; quasiparticle and optical excitations in solids and nanostructures; electron correlation effects in bulk and reduced-dimensional systems; carbon and BN nanotubes; graphene; superconductivity; electron transport through single molecules and other nanostructures. The objective is to explain and predict the properties of materials using first-principles theories and computation.

As a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Simons Foundation’s Mathematics and Physical Sciences division, and the Academia Sinica (Taiwan), Prof. Louie is identified as one of the most highly cited researchers in the field of physics and one of the 25 most highly cited authors in nanoscience. He was also elected a Fellow of Materials Research Society and a Foreign Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His pioneering work on the ab-initio treatment of material properties earned him many awards and honors, including the Benjamin Lee Professorship Award of the Asian-Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics (2020), Materials Theory Award of the Materials Research Society (2015), the Foresight Institute Richard P Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (2003), APS Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics (1996), and the US Department of Energy Award for Sustained Outstanding Research in Solid State Physics (1993).