Professor Luis Jauregui receives Scialog: Quantum Matter and Information award
Jauregui gives much credit to the other members of his lab for his successful research proposal. “Their creativity, dedication and sustained efforts play a central role in advancing our research projects,” he said.
Professor Luis Jauregui of the UC Irvine Department of Physics & Astronomy recently received a Scialog: Quantum Matter and Information award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. The award, which is part of a program designed to catalyze new interdisciplinary collaborations and advance high-risk, high-reward research ideas, will provide $60,000 of direct costs for one year to Jauregui’s lab. The funding will expand the group's research into the properties of quantum materials. “This project explores how rare-earth defects embedded within quantum materials can serve as internal probes of electronic and quantum behavior,” said Jauregui. “Rather than interrogating quantum matter solely through external measurements, we aim to use these defects to sense and characterize complex phenomena from within the material itself – it's approach opens new pathways for studying strongly correlated and nonequilibrium quantum systems.” The path to the award began when Jauregui participated in a four-day workshop sponsored by RCSA in 2025. Alongside 50 early-career faculty from across the United States, Jauregui and a group of collaborators assembled a two-page proposal followed by a five-minute presentation. Ultimately, 30 proposals were submitted, of which only seven were selected for funding, including Jauregui’s. “I’m deeply grateful to my collaborators – our team has faculty from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, Indiana University and UCI – for their insight and contributions, and to the Scialog: QMI program and its sponsors for supporting this work.”