The Department of Physics welcomes two new faculty members: Eslam Khalaf, as Assistant Professor of Physics, and Sonia Paban, Senior Lecturer on Physics and Senior Research Scientist in Physics. Both Prof. Khalaf and Dr. Paban were previously faculty members at University of Texas at Austin.
Prof. Khalaf, originally from Egypt, received his Ph.D. summa cum laude from Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research Stuttgart, Germany, and continued as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, in Prof. Vishwanath's group, from 2018 to 2022. A condensed matter theorist, he works mostly on theoretical problems motivated by experiments. His work addresses questions in the physics of disorder, topological insulators and semimetals, mechanisms for superconductivity in multi-layer graphene heterostructures, and new phenomena in quasicrystals and moiré systems.
Dr. Paban is a high-energy theorist currently working on early universe physics. She is interested in understanding the effects of many active fields during inflation. Most recently, she has studied the robustness of inflation to inhomogeneous initial conditions and the impact on the power spectrum and non-gaussianity of primordial anisotropy. Paban grew up in Catalonia, Spain, and received her B.S. and doctorate from the Universitat de Barcelona.