Laura Kim, Ph.D.

Principal Investigator

lbkim@ucla.edu

Professor Laura Kim received her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology in 2013 and 2019, respectively. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, she held the Intelligence Community (IC) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a core faculty member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and a member of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering at UCLA. 

She was named a 2020 EECS Rising Star and a recipient of the IC Postdoctoral Fellowship, Gary Malouf Foundation Award, and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She serves on the Early Career Editorial Advisory Board of Applied Physics Letters.

At UCLA, she leads the Quantum Materials and Devices Laboratory that focuses on probing elusive light-driven phenomena in quantum-engineered materials and unlocking the next-generation photonic, polaritonic, optoelectronic, and quantum devices. Her research interests span from 2D quantum materials, non-equilibrium carrier dynamics, photonic quasiparticle interactions to quantum sensing, diamond spin microscopy, defect centers in diamonds, metasurfaces, nanophotonics, and plasmonics. Her earlier work was centered around understanding photonic-quasiparticle-driven light-matter interactions in low-dimensional materials. She is the first author of the work that showed the first experimental demonstration of a non-Planckian mid-infrared light-emitting mechanism originating from graphene hot plasmons. Her recent research involves developing programmable spin arrays and optimized spin-photon interfaces for a new type of wide-field, high-speed quantum sensing system. Her work has been reported in Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Nano Letters, ACS Photonics, Nanophotonics, PRB, and JES.