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Each researcher, acknowledged for inquiry-oriented studies in chemistry or physics, will obtain up to $2 million over a five-year period.
The Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech today unveiled the 2025 cohort of Brown Investigators. This group, the second to be chosen through the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences, consists of eight esteemed mid-career faculty addressing essential challenges in the physical sciences, particularly those with prospective long-term practical implementations in chemistry and physics. Each researcher will receive a maximum of $2 million over five years.
The Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech, established in 2023 through a $400-million contribution to the Institute from entrepreneur, philanthropist, and alumnus Ross M. Brown (BS ’56, MS ’57), aims to promote foundational scientific discoveries that could lead to breakthroughs benefiting society—a mission it shares with Caltech.
“Mid-career faculty are at a pivotal point in their careers where they are prepared to make significant contributions to their fields,” Brown states, “My ongoing hope is that the support from the Brown Investigator Awards will empower them to explore bolder innovative concepts that transcend their current research endeavors and align with emerging passions, particularly amid funding uncertainties.”
The 2025 investigators are:
Dmitry Abanin, Professor of Physics, Princeton University, to devise a novel theoretical and computational framework for understanding the emergent characteristics of quantum materials and synthetic quantum systems operating outside thermal equilibrium.
László Kürti, Professor of Chemistry, Rice University, to create chemical methodologies for fabricating stable neutral polynitrogen cages—molecules solely composed of nitrogen atoms possessing extraordinary energy storage capabilities. These rare structures maintain stability under normal conditions while releasing energy on demand without combustion and degrade cleanly into heated nitrogen gas, providing a transformative platform for propulsion and energy storage.
Mark Levin, Associate Professor of Chemistry, University of Chicago, to apply insights gained from skeletal editing of aromatic compounds (stable chemicals with a flat ring structure) to reactions involving aliphatic compounds (three-dimensional, more reactive chemicals), with the aim of accessing unusual compounds that are unattainable through conventional chemical synthesis.
Brad Ramshaw, Associate Professor of Physics, Cornell University, to innovate a new technique utilizing ultrasound to investigate the electronic states of atomically thin materials.
Cindy Regal, Professor of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, and Baur-SPIE Chair at JILA, to showcase quantum entanglement—a link between particles such as photons or atoms that remains despite their physical separation—with larger mass objects than have previously been entangled.
Xavier Roy, Professor of Chemistry, Columbia University, to design and investigate materials where electrons encounter competing pathways for movement, leading to complex behaviors that, if managed, could enable new types of quantum technologies.
Hailiang Wang, Professor of Chemistry, Yale University, to advance electrocatalysis to transform inorganic waste substances, like CO2 and NOx, into useful and functional organic compounds containing multiple carbon–carbon and carbon–nitrogen bonds.
Joel Yuen-Zhou, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC San Diego, for theoretical and computational studies to leverage the sensitivity of specific chemical reactions to the electron’s spin in photoredox catalysis to selectively favor one of two enantiomers (mirror-image forms of compounds).
Brown inaugurated the Investigator Awards in 2020 through the Brown Science Foundation, underlining the belief that “scientific discovery is a driving force in the enhancement of the human condition,” as indicated in its press release from the Science Philanthropy Alliance, which assisted Brown in actualizing his philanthropic aspirations.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with Ross Brown and the members of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences to pinpoint and support exceptional researchers in fundamental chemistry and physics,” states Caltech Provost David A. Tirrell, Carl and Shirley Larson Provostial Chair and Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.
A total of 21 researchers have been acknowledged in the initial four years of the program, including eight in the 2024 cohort, the first group to be installed under the guidance of the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech.
Previous laureates include MIT’s Nuh Gedik, who is pioneering a novel microscopy technique that captures images of electrons photo-emitted from a surface while also measuring their energy and momentum; Kerri A. Pratt from the University of Michigan, for her research aimed at identifying the chemical compounds and mechanisms defining the Arctic’s atmosphere, which is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the planet; Andrea Young of UC Santa Barbara, who is employing innovative fabrication methods to develop new types of qubits, the quantum computing counterpart to classical bits, within two-dimensional materials; Columbia University’s Tanya Zelevinsky, who investigates spectroscopy of cold molecules for revolutionary physics; Princeton University’s Waseem Bakr, who collaborates with ultracold quantum gases to create scalable structures for quantum computation; and Robert Knowles, whose studies will probe a novel theory for the emergence of homochirality—the occurrence in nature of only one of two mirror-image forms of biomolecules. Caltech’s David Hsieh, Donald A. Glaser Professor of Physics and executive officer for physics, was among two inaugural recipients of the award in 2020.
Brown Investigators from all cohorts are invited to an annual conference that facilitates idea exchanges. The second annual meeting took place at Caltech in February 2025.
To select the new cohort, a limited number of prestigious research universities from across the nation were invited to nominate faculty members who had achieved tenure within the last decade and are conducting groundbreaking fundamental research in the physical sciences. The nominees were subsequently reviewed by an independent scientific advisory board that recommended grant recipients. In managing the program, Caltech does not nominate its own researchers for Brown Investigator Awards. In return, the Institute allocates additional funds from the Brown donation to support essential research in chemistry and physics.
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