Postdoctoral Fellows of the Burke Institute
The Burke Institute has several endowed fellowships for distinguished postdoctoral scholars in theoretical physics such as the Sherman Fairchild Prize Postdoctoral Fellowships, David and Ellen Lee Distinguished Fellowships, and McCone, DuBridge, and Tolman Fellowships. The support offered by these fellowships enables theorists to pursue innovative research.
For postdoctoral fellowship applications, check here.
Past Postdoctoral Fellows Around the World
Burke Institute postdoctoral fellows have made significant contributions to theoretical physics across multiple continents. Many hold distinguished academic positions, furthering research and expanding the institute's global impact. The map below highlights the worldwide reach of more than 170 fellows and their ongoing contributions.
In February 2015, some former fellows gathered at Caltech for the Inaugural Celebration and Symposium of the Burke Institute.
Current Fellows of the Burke Institute
2025 - 2028
2024-2027
2023 - 2026
Past Postdoctoral Fellows
Sherman Fairchild Prize Fellowship
| Last | First | Period | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Longaretti | Pierre | 1987-1990 | Permanent Researcher at Grenoble |
| Lerche | Wolfgang | 1988-1991 | Senior Staff Scientist at CERN |
| Ratra | Bharat | 1989-1992 | Professor at Kansas State University |
| Qian | Yong-Zhong | 1990-1992 | Professor at University of Minnesota |
| Tu | Yuhai | 1990-1993 | Permanent Research Staff at IBM |
| Ma | Chung-Pei | 1993-1996 | Professor at UC Berkeley |
| Last | Yoram | 1994-1997 | Professor at Hebrew University |
| Lifshitz | Ron | 1995-1998 | Profsesor and Chair of Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Solid State Physics, Tel Aviv University |
| Brady | Patrick | 1995-1998 | Professor at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee |
| Rajagopal | Krishna | 1996-1997 | Professor at MIT |
| Li | Zhi-Yun | 1996-1999 | Professor at University of Virginia |
| Beacom | John | 1997-2000 | Professor at Ohio State University |
| Burke | Peter | 1997-2000 | Professor at UC Irvine |
| Eikenberry | Stephen | 1997-2001 | Professor at University of Florida |
| Lipan | Ovidiu | 1998-2000 | Associate Professor at the University of Richmond |
| Ryd | Anders | 1996-2002 | Associate Professor at Cornell |
| Chepelev | Iouri | 2001-2004 | Data Scientist, Veterans Affairs Medical Center |
| Hayden | Patrick | 2001-2004 | Professor at Stanford |
| Milosavljevic | Milos | 2002-2006 | Associate Prof at University of Texas, Austin |
| Damanik | David | 2003-2006 | Professor at Rice University |
| Pfeiffer | Harald | 2003-2006 | Group Leader at Max-Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Golm |
| Cirigliano | Vincenzo | 2003-2006 | Staff Scientist at Los Alamos National Lab |
| Vidal | Guifre | 2003-2005 | Faculty Member at Perimeter Institute |
| Bell | Nicole | 2004-2006 | Senior Lecturer at University of Melbourne |
| Klich | Israel | 2004-2007 | Associate Professor at University of Virginia |
| Shigemori | Masaki | 2004-2007 | Associate Prof at Kyoto University |
| Brink | Jeandrew | 2005-2007 | Lecturer at Stellenbosch University |
| Nagai | Daisuke | 2005-2008 | Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Yale University |
| Ando | Shin'ichiro | 2006-2009 | Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam |
| Barnett | Ryan | 2006-2009 | Lecturer at Imperial College, London |
| Lee | Keith | 2006-2009 | Postdoc at University of Pittsburgh |
| Peng | Fang | 2006-2009 | Juniper Networks |
| Saraykin | Kirill | 2007-2010 | COO, Strategic Transformation, Moscow |
| Breuer | Jonathan | 2007-2009 | Senior Lecturer at Hebrew University |
| Brooks | Alyson | 2008-2011 | Assistant Professor at Rutgers University |
| Hinderer | Tanja | 2008-2011 | Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Maryland |
| Jordan | Stephen | 2008-2011 | Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research |
| Ott | Christian | 2008-2009 | Visiting Professor at Kyoto University |
| Jiang | Liang | 2009- 2012 | Professor of Molecular Engineering, UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering |
| Tsang | David | 2009-2012 | CTC Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Maryland |
| Bergman | Doron | 2009-2013 | Capital One |
| Kotera | Kumiko | 2011-2012 | Director of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris |
| Evenbly | Glen | 2011-2014 | Assistant Professor at University of Sherbrooke |
| Putrov | Pavel | 2012-2015 | Permanent Scientific Staff, ICTP Trieste |
| Mong | Roger | 2012-2015 | Associate Professor at University of Pittsburgh |
| Yan | Wenbin | 2012-2015 | Assistant Professor at Tsinghua University |
| Radice | David | 2013- 2016 | Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University and Member at Institute for Advanced Study |
| Lysov | Vyacheslav | 2014-2017 | Assistant Professor at the Shanghai Institute for Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Sciences |
| Song | Justin | 2014-2016 | Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University |
| Gosset | David | 2014-2016 | Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo |
| Gopalakrishnan | Sarang | 2015-2016 | Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton |
| Squire | Jonathan | 2015-2018 | Associate Professor at University of Otago, New Zealand |
| Storch | Natalia | 2015-2018 | Science Fiction Writer |
| Dedushenko | Mykola | 2016-2019 | Research Assistant Professor, Simons Center (SCGP), Stony Brook |
| Lin | Ying-Hsuan | 2016-2020 | Postdoc at Harvard |
| Jochym-O'Connor | Tomas | 2016-2019 | Staff Member at Watson Research Center, IBM |
| Haim | Arbel | 2017-2020 | Senior Lecturer at Hebrew University |
| Lee | Eve | 2017-2019 | Assistant Professor at McGill University |
| Necib | Lina | 2017-2020 | Assistant Professor, MIT |
| Paquette | Natalie | 2017-2020 | Associate Professor, University of Washington, Seattle |
| Peng | Yang | 2017-2020 | Assistant Professor at California State University, Northridge |
| Bai | Yuntao | 2018-2021 | Anthropic (non academia) |
| Ji | Suoqing | 2018-2021 | Faculty at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory |
| Lucia | Angelo | 2018-2021 | Ramon y Caial Fellow, Spain |
| Meltzer | David | 2018-2021 | Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University |
| Slagle | Kevin | 2018-2022 | Research Scientist at Open AI |
| Thompson | Alex | 2018-2022 | Assistant Professor, UC Davis |
| Caiazzo | Ilaria | 2019-2022 | Assistant Professor, Institute of Science and Technology, Austria |
| Kang | Monica | 2019-2023 | Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University |
| Nezami | Sepehr | 2019-2022 | Staff, Renaissance Technologies LLC |
| Yu | Hang | 2019-2022 | Assistant Professor, Montana State University |
| Zhang | Pengfei | 2019-2022 | Associate Professor - Fudan University, Shanghai |
| Deppe | Nils | 2020-2023 | Assistant Professor - Cornell University |
| Helset | Andreas | 2020-2023 | Postdoctoral Scholar - CERN |
| Klco | Natalie | 2020-2022 | Assistant Professor of Physics, Duke University |
| Moudgalya | Sanjay | 2020-2023 | Junior Group Leader, TUM (Munich) |
| Li | Dongzi | 2020-2023 | Assistant Professor, Tsinghua University |
| Murgui | Clara | 2020-2023 | Assistant Professor, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona / IFAE |
| Parra-Martinez | Julio | 2020-2023 | Professor, IHES |
| Benjamin | Nathan | 2021-2024 | Assistant Professor, University of Southern California |
| Wilson-Gerow | Jordan | 2021-2024 | Assistant Professor, University of Guelph and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics |
| Elben | Andreas | 2021-2024 | Tenure Track Scientist, Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland |
| Kiman | Rocio | 2022-2025 | Postdoc, UC Santa Barbara |
| Murciano | Sara | 2022-2025 | Faculty, CNRS, Université Paris Saclay |
| Pal | Sridip | 2022-2025 | Faculty, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, France (TBC) |
| Roulet | Javier | 2022-2025 | KICP fellow, University of Chicago |
| Sala de Torres-Solanot | Pablo | 2022-2025 | Ramón y Cajal fellow at IFT, Spain |
| Tantivasadakarn | Nathanan | 2022-2025 | Assistant Professor at Stony Brook |
| Tsuna | Daichi | 2022-2025 | Postdoc, Harvard |
| Vu | Nils | 2022-2025 | PI at University of Zurich |
| Anschuetz | Eric | 2023-2026 | Faculty, National University of Singapore |
| Badurina | Leonardo | 2023-2026 | Postdoc, Caltech |
| Berghaus | Kim | 2023-2026 | Faculty, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology |
| Huang | Xiaoshan | 2023-2026 | TBD |
| Schuster | Thomas | 2023-2026 | Faculty, University of Chicago |
| Shavit | Gal | 2023-2026 | TBD |
| Yang | Lei Gioia | 2023-2026 | Postdoc, University of Boulder (2026-2027); faculty, Tufts University (2027) |
| Drummond | Lisa | 2024- | |
| Hu | Yue | 2026- | |
| Fuentes | Jose Rafael | 2024- | |
| Passaro | Davide | 2024- | |
| Zhong | Yici | 2024- | |
| Xu | Qian | 2024-2026 | Senior Theoretical Scientist at Oratonic |
| Calderon-Infante | Jose | 2025- | |
| Eck | Luisa | 2025- | |
| Rafael Fuentes | Jose | 2025- | |
| Gavrilova | Margarita | 2025- | |
| Glanz | Hila | 2025- | |
| Homrich | Alexandre | 2025- | |
| Paul | Nisarga | 2025- | |
| Wittek | Nikolas | 2025- | |
| Fumagalli | Giulia | 2025- |
Tolman Fellowship
| Last | First | Period | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Press | William | 1972-1973 | Professor at University of Texas at Austin |
| Teukolsky | Saul | 1973-1974 | Professor at Caltech and Cornell Univeristy |
| Tremaine | Scott | 1975-1977 | Professor at Institute for Advanced Study |
| Zurek | Wojciech | 1979-1981 | Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory |
| Yaffe | Laurence | 1980-1982 | Professor at University of Washington |
| Grinstein | Benjamin | 1984-1987 | Professor at UC San Diego |
| Thompson | Christopher | 1988-1991 | Professor at University of Toronto |
| Lai | Dong | 1994-1997 | Professor at Cornell University |
| Davies | Melvyn | 1992-1995 | Professor at Lund University |
| Nielsen | Michael | 1998-2003 | Writer |
| Buonanno | Alessandra | 1999-2001 | Director of Max-Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics at Golm |
| Pretorius | Frans | 2002-2005 | Professor at Princeton |
| Leung | Debbie | 2002-2004 | Professor at University of Waterloo |
McCone Fellowship
| Last | First | Period | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trivedi | Sandip | 1992-1994 | Director of Tata Institute |
| Mehen | Thomas | 1997-2000 | Professor at Duke University |
| Cheung | Yeuk-Kwan Edna | 2000-2002 | Professor at Nanjing University |
| Su | Shufang | 2000-2003 | Professor at University of Arizona |
| Frey | Andrew | 2003-2006 | Professor at University of Winnipeg |
| Schafer-Nameki | Sakura | 2006-2009 | Professor, Oxford University |
| Marsano | Joseph | 2006-2009 | Partner, Chief of Research at a Proprietary Trading Company |
| Keller | Christopher | 2009-2012 | Associate Professor, University of Arizona |
| Leichenauer | Stefan | 2011-2014 | Vice President of Engineering and lead scientist at SandboxAQ |
| Gadde | Abhijit | 2011-2014 | Professor at Tata Institute for Fundamental Research |
| An | Haipeng | 2014-2017 | Associate Professor, Tsinghua University |
| Solon | Mikhail | 2017-2020 | Assistant Professor at UCLA |
DuBridge Fellowship
| Last | First | Period | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bildsten | Lars | 1991-1994 | Director of KITP; professor at UC Santa Barbara |
| Fuchs | Christopher | 1996-1999 | Professor at University of Massachusetts, Boston |
| Shaviv | Nir Joseph | 1996-1999 | Professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| Heyl | Jeremy | 1997-2000 | Professor at University of British Columbia |
| Buchalter | Ari | 1999-2001 | MediaMath |
| MacFadyen | Andrew | 2001-2004 | Associate Professor at New York University |
| Squires | Todd | 2002-2004 | Associate Professor at University of British Columbia |
| Furlanetto | Steven | 2003-2006 | Professor at UCLA |
| Childs | Andrew | 2004-2007 | Professor at University of Maryland |
| Mantry | Gautam | 2005-2008 | Associate Professor, University of North Georgia |
| Fiete | Gregory | 2006-2008 | Professor at Northeastern University |
| Alicea | Jason | 2007-2010 | William K. Davis Professor at Caltech |
| Buckley | Matthew | 2008-2010 | Associate Professor at Rutgers |
| Zwiebel | Benjamin | 2009-2012 | McKay Brothers |
| Pekker | David | 2010-2013 | Associate Professor at University of Pittsburgh |
| Gorshkov | Alexey | 2010-2013 | Staff Scientist at NIST at Maryland |
| Roberts | Luke | 2012-2013 | Assistant Professor at NSCL, Michigan State University |
| Fuller | Jim | 2013-2017 | Professor at Caltech |
| Clausen | Drew | 2013-2016 | Data Scientist at Kaiser Permanente Health Innovation Team |
| Bao | Ning | 2014-2017 | Assistant Professor at Northeastern University |
| Mishmash | Ryan | 2014-2017 | Research Scientist at IBM Quantum |
| Saraswat | Prashant | 2016-2019 | |
| Wheeler | Coral | 2016-2019 | Assistant Professor at Cal-Poly Pomona |
| Albert | Victor | 2017-2020 | Staff Scientist at NIST at Maryland |
| Knapp | Christina | 2019-2020 | Associate Researcher, Microsoft Station Q, UCSB |
| Butsky | Iryna | 2021-2023 | Hubble Fellow, Stanford University |
| Zhou | Leo | 2021-2024 | Assistant Professor, UCLA |
| McNamara | Jacob | 2022-2025 | Postdoc at Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, Stony Brook Univ |
| Hillman | Aaron | 2023-2026 | TBD |
| Farrell | Roland | 2024-current | |
| Ranard | Daniel | 2024-current | |
| Balasubramanian | Shankar | 2025-current |
David and Ellen Lee Fellowship
| Last | First | Period | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hackl | Andreas | 2010-2011 | Consultant at SAP |
| Yoshida | Beni | 2012-2015 | Faculty Member at Perimeter Institute |
| Trnka | Jaroslav | 2013-2016 | Professor UC Davis |
| Fluder | Martin | 2015-2018 | Quantitative Researcher at Man Group |
| Lu | Wenbin | 2018-2021 | Spitzer Fellow at Princeton, followed by Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley |
| Wang | Yikun | 2021-2024 | Postdoc at Johns Hopkins University |
| Davydova | Margarita | 2024-current |
Bantrell Fellowship
| Last | First | Period | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mlodinow | Leonard | 1980-1983 | Writer |
| Applegate | James | 1981-1984 | Professor at Columbia University |
| Solomon | Sorin | 1982-1985 | Professor at Hebrew University |
| Hogan | Craig | 1982-1985 | Professor at University of Chicago |
| Goodman | Jeremy | 1983-1986 | Professor at Princeton University |
| Hawley | John | 1984-1987 | Professor at University of Virginia |
NAPF Fellowship
| Last | First | Period | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Narayan | Ramesh | 1983-1985 | Professor at Harvard |
| Madau | Piero | 1987-1989 | Professor at UC Santa Cruz |
| Murray | Norman | 1989-1991 | Professor at University of Toronto |
Weingart Fellowship
| Last | First | Period | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warner | Nicholas | 1982-1985 | Professor at University of Southern California |
| Impey | Chris | 1983-1986 | University Distinguished Professor at University of Arizona |
| Milton | Graeme | 1984-1986 | Professor at University of Utah |
| Zirnbauer | Martin | 1984-1987 | Professor at University of Cologne |
| Karma | Alain | 1985-1988 | Professor at Northeastern University |
| Rohm | Ryan | 1985-1988 | Adjunct Professor at University of North Carolina |
| Gilbert | Gerald | 1986-1988 | Principal Scientist at MITRE |
Brinson Fellowship
| Last | First | Period | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kusuki | Yuya | 2021 - 2024 | Associate Professor, Kyushu University |
Research Assistant Professors
| Last | First | Period | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Horava | Petr | 1997-2000 | Professor at UC Berkeley |
| Yang | Kun | 1997-1999 | Professor at Florida State University |
| Cooray | Asantha | 2001-2005 | Professor at UC Irvine |
| Gomis | Jaume | 2002-2004 | Faculty Member at Perimeter Institute |
| Mikhailov | Andrei | 2003-2009 | Professor at University Estadual Paulista, Brazil |
| Sari | Re’em | 1998-2003 | Professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| Nakar | Ehud | 2004-2009 | Professor at Tel Aviv University |
| Bromberg | Kenneth | 2001-2004 | Professor at University of Utah |
| Bauer | Christian | 2003-2006 | Senior Staff Scientist at LBNL |
| Baranovsky | Vladimir | 2004-2006 | Assistant Professor at UC Irvine |
| Ghigginni | Paolo | 2007-2008 | CNRS Researcher at University Nantes |
| Lee | Seung-Yeop | 2009-2013 | Assistant Professor at University of South Florida |
| Nakayama | Yu | 2010-2015 | Professor, Yukawa Institute, Kyoto University |
| Alberts | Thomas | 2011-2014 | Associate Professor at University of Utah |