David Goldhaber-Gordon, PhD

David Goldhaber-Gordon is a professor of physics at Stanford University whose experimental realization of the Kondo effect in a single-electron transistor opened a new era in the study of many-body quantum impurity physics. in physics and A.M. in history of science from Harvard in 1994, and his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1999 as a Hertz Fellow. During his doctorate, working with Marc Kastner, he made the first experimental demonstration of the Kondo effect in a semiconductor nanostructure — using a quantum dot as a tunable magnetic impurity embedded in a conducting host, and showing that the spin of a single electron trapped in the dot is screened by surrounding conduction electrons into a quantum singlet state. The landmark 1998 Nature paper reporting this result sparked a worldwide renaissance in Kondo physics. Following his Ph.D., he spent two years as a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, then joined the Stanford faculty, where he is a professor of physics. He received the inaugural George E. Valley Prize of the American Physical Society (2002), the University of Illinois McMillan Award in condensed matter physics (2002), the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research (2006), and a Packard Fellowship. He comes from a distinguished family of physicists that includes Nobel laureate Maurice Goldhaber.