People
Principal investigator
You Zhou
Associate Professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Research faculty and scientists
Assistant Research Professor
Assistant Research Scientist
Postdoctoral researchers
Ph.D. University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 2024
Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2025 · co-advised with Mohammad Hafezi
Ph.D. University of Maryland, 2026
Graduate students
Electrical Engineering
Materials Science and Engineering · co-advised with Neil Zimmerman, NIST
Undergraduate researchers
- Sihoon Sung
- Kevan Kazeminezhad
- Didi Zhang
- Hannah Magruder
- Naima Haidara
Student awards
- 2026Sabyasachi Das — FIAP Ken Hass Outstanding Student Paper Award, APS March Meeting
- 2025Liuxin Gu — Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship, Graduate School, University of Maryland
Alumni
Former Ph.D. students and postdocs
Ph.D. 2026, Physics · co-advised with Mohammad Hafezi
Postdoc, Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter
Ph.D. 2025, Materials Science and Engineering · Postdoc 2025–26
Research Scientist, Western Digital
Postdoc 2022–24
Associate Professor, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Former undergraduate researchers (selected)
- Suraj Maurya, now at Boeing
- William Mah, now at Mater. Sci. and Eng., Northwestern University
- Karandeep Takhtani, now at First Solar
- Sam Felsenfeld, now at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
Former high-school researchers (selected)
- Ellie Montemayor, now at Physics, MIT
- Kirill Mamantov
- Dhruva Arun, now at Elec. and Comp. Eng., Carnegie Mellon University
Join
Openings
We have openings for postdoctoral researchers and research scientists, and we welcome graduate and undergraduate students at all levels. Current projects include optical probes of Wigner crystals and polarons in gate-tunable heterostructures, nonlinear and quantum optics with excitons in atomically thin semiconductors, and sub-wavelength optical lattices for excitons.
Ph.D. applicants: apply to the Ph.D. program in Materials Science and Engineering, Physics, or Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland. You are welcome to write to You Zhou at youzhou (at) umd.edu before you apply, with a short note about your background and interests.
Postdoctoral researchers and research scientists: write to You Zhou at youzhou (at) umd.edu with a short note about your background and interests.
Undergraduates and high-school students: Maryland undergraduates are welcome at any stage; no prior research experience is needed. In recent summers we have also hosted students through the Army Educational Outreach Program, the National Security Scholars Summer Internship Program, and the Summer RISE Program of Montgomery County Public Schools. To get involved, write to You Zhou at the address above.
Members gain hands-on experience in materials synthesis, nanofabrication, electronics, cryogenic optics, and programming, and work on projects that combine all of them. (Updated October 2026.)