Prize Recipient

Chao Li
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"For seminal and highly creative contributions to the development of microfabricated, miniature atomic beam technology and the invention of new chip-scale techniques that enable precise and targeted delivery of neutral atoms."

Chao Li earned his bachelor's degree in physics with the highest honors from Jilin University in 2016, where he was part of the Tang Aoqing Honors Program. During his undergraduate years, he visited Nanyang Technological University and Georgia Institute of Technology, before returning to Georgia Tech in 2016 to pursue a Ph.D. His doctoral research focused on developing passive and active collimation technologies for thermal rubidium atomic beams on-chip, Monte Carlo simulations and precision spectroscopy for beam formation and characterization, as well as the system-level design of functional atomic beam devices for timekeeping and inertial sensing. After receiving his doctoral degree in 2022, he joined the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT as a postdoc, where he has been working on the development of large-scale photonic integrated circuits for the fast and coherent control of various types of qubits, such as color centers in diamond, trapped neutral atoms, or ions. Thesis advisor: Prof. Chandra Raman