Columbia Physics is delighted to announce that our very own James McIver has been awarded a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship in recognition of his outstanding achievements in scientific research and the many promising contributions still to come. He and fellow GSAS faculty member Hassan Afrouzi from the Economics Department are among 126 recipients from across the United States and Canada who have been selected for the 2026 cohort. In addition to physics and economics, the program honors scholars from the fields of chemistry, mathematics, computer science, neuroscience, and earth system science.
McIver, who was appointed to Columbia Physics as an Associate Professor in 2022, studies electrical and optical properties of quantum materials on ultrafast timescales and at terahertz frequencies. He's the principal investigator for the McIver Lab, which was founded in Hamburg when he was appointed as an independent Max Planck research group leader with the Max Planck—NYC Center for Nonequilibrium Quantum Phenomena, a collaborative research initiative between the Max Planck Society, the Flatiron Institute, and Columbia University. Now based with him at Columbia, his research group has a particular interest in investigating how charge transport is modified in the presence of strong laser fields. Using a suite of ultrafast optoelectronic techniques, they're able to realize quantum effects that are inaccessible under equilibrium conditions.
The two-year Sloan Research Fellowships, which are administered by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, award early-career scholars with $75,000 to use at their discretion in support of original research. It's part of the Foundation's mission "to improve the welfare of all through the advancement of scientific knowledge." McIver is joining a distinguished group of 188 Columbia faculty who have received a Sloan Fellowship since the program launched in 1955.
Congratulations, James!
