Ping named H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellow

Yuan Ping, associate professor of materials science and engineering with affiliate appointments in physics and chemistry, is among 18 faculty members named 2026-27 H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellows at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The fellowship, administered by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, honors faculty who have shown outstanding research achievement within six years of earning tenure. It carries a $60,000 award that recipients can draw on over five years and is named for the late H.I. Romnes, a former president of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s board of trustees.

Ping’s research is unified by a single ambition: to build the theoretical and computational methods that let scientists predict the quantum behavior of real materials from the laws of quantum mechanics alone, without input from experiment. Such prediction is only as powerful as the methods behind it, and for decades a central class of problems lay beyond reach: how spins relax and lose coherence, and how quasiparticles evolve in time, inside solids where quantum many-body interactions couple electrons, phonons, and their environment. Ping closed this gap by creating a first-principles framework for open quantum dynamics in solids, a methodological advance that brought these complex quantum many-body processes under rigorous, predictive theory. Characteristically, she carried the work the full distance from formalism to scalable open-source software, so that the methods she develops become instruments the entire community can use. The payoff of this method-first approach now extends across quantum information science, spintronics, and energy conversion, where her framework predicts new materials and properties that earlier theories could not reliably forecast.

Dorota Brzezinska, vice chancellor for research, said the Romnes fellowship and its companion awards reflect some of the university’s most consequential investments in the people driving its research mission. She said the honors give faculty the recognition and flexibility to pursue ambitious ideas, help extend the Wisconsin Idea and encourage the next generation of scholars.