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Roman Kuzmin earns NSF CAREER Award

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Roman Kuzmin

Congrats to Roman Kuzmin, the Dunson Cheng Assistant Professor of Physics, for being selected for an NSF CAREER award. The 5-year award will support Kuzmin and his group’s research on understanding fluxonium qubits and how their properties can be used to simulate the collective behavior of quantum materials.

Superconducting qubits are one promising technology for quantum computing, and the best-studied type is the transmon. Kuzmin’s work will investigate the fluxonium type, which he expects to be an improvement over transmons because they have demonstrated higher coherence, and their ground and first excited state are better separated from other energy levels.

“These properties make fluxonium behave similar to a magnetic moment, or like a magnetic atom, which we can fabricate in the lab and tune its properties,” Kuzmin says. “Things become interesting when interactions are very strong, and you need to involve many-body physics to describe them. We plan to build circuits which recreate the behavior of these complicated systems so that we have better control and can study multiple collective phenomena that appear in materials with magnetic impurities.”

In the lab, this research will be explored by building circuits with fluxonium qubits, capacitors, and inductors, which are further combined into more complicated circuits. The circuits will be used to test theoretical predictions of such behaviors as quantum phase transitions, entanglement scaling, and localization.

In addition to an innovative research component, NSF proposals require that the research has broader societal impacts, such as developing a competitive STEM workforce or increasing public understanding of science. Kuzmin plans to expand his work in the department’s Wonders of Physics program. This past February, he helped build a wave machine (with Steve Narf) to visually demonstrate patterns of interference, and he performed in all eight shows. His group has also participated in TeachQuantum, a summer research program for Wisconsin high school teachers run through HQAN, the NSF-funded Quantum Leap Challenge Institute that UW–Madison is a part of.

“One of the goals of this proposal is to introduce more quantum physics to the annual Wonders of Physics show; another is to provide hands-on training for high school teachers in my lab,” Kuzmin says. “Together, these activities will increase K-12 students’ engagement with quantum science and technology.”

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is an NSF-wide activity that offers the Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.

Four professors earn promotions, including tenure for Ke Fang

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Congratulations to Associate Professor Ke Fang on her promotion with tenure, to Professor Justin Vandenbroucke on his promotion to full professor, and to Profs. Dan Hooper and Britton Plourde who were both granted tenure!  

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Ke Fang

Prof. Fang is an experimental particle astrophysicist and WIPAC investigator who studies the origins of subatomic particles and their fundamental nature by detecting messengers from throughout the universe. She has made major contributions to the analysis of data from the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory, the IceCube Observatory and the NASA Fermi satellite. 

In 2021, Fang received the Shakti P. Duggal Award for Early Career Contributions in Cosmic Ray Physics. In 2023, she received the NSF CAREER award. In 2024, she was named a Sloan Fellow. Later that year, she was named the inaugural recipient of the Bernice Durand Faculty Fellowship, a departmental award named in honor of Durand, one of the first two women faculty members in the UW–Madison physics department. She also served as the US spokesperson for HAWC in 2023-2025. 

“Ke Fang is one of the most impactful astroparticle phenomenologists of her generation,” says physics department chair and professor Kevin Black. “Her work is highly original and broad with strong implications for the emerging area of multi-messenger astronomy and particle astrophysics.” 

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Justin Vandenbroucke

Prof. Vandenbroucke is also a WIPAC investigator and experimental particle astrophysicist. He joined the department in 2013. His main research focus is in multi-messenger astrophysics, including neutrino astronomy, gamma-ray astronomy, and cosmic rays. He is a member of the IceCube collaboration and the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory consortium and is an affiliate member of the Fermi LAT and VERITAS collaborations. 

Vandenbroucke was previously promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2019. He was named a Vilas Associate from 2023-2025, and was a co-recipient of UW2020 awards in 2018 and 2020. He also leads the Distributed Electronic Cosmic-Ray Observatory (DECO), a citizen science project that enables users around the world to detect cosmic rays and other energetic particles with their cell phones and tablets. 

“Justin Vandenbrouke is an outstanding experimentalist who, at the same time, develops creative and challenging data analysis projects that have led to scientific results published in highly cited papers,” Black says. “He does this in two different fields, gamma-ray and neutrino astrophysics, and is a leader in both.”

Profile photo of Dan Hooper
Dan Hooper

Prof. Hooper, PhD’03 was named the director of WIPAC and joined the physics faculty as a full professor in 2024. He is a theoretical particle astrophysicist whose research focuses on the interface between particle physics and cosmology. His work has spanned the areas of dark matter, high-energy neutrino astronomy, gamma-ray astronomy and cosmic-rays. He is the author of several books and co- hosts the physics podcast “Why This Universe?” breaking down some of some of the biggest ideas in physics into easily digestible chunks.

“Dan Hooper is a singular figure in his field, a stand-out leader in terms of scientific impact whose ideas cast a wide influence on the study of high energy theory, dark matter phenomenology, collider physics, astroparticle physics, and the direct experimental and observational search for dark matter,” Black says. 

profile photo of Britton Plourde
Britton Plourde

Prof. Plourde joined the department as a full professor in 2024 from Syracuse University. He is an experimental condensed matter physicist who studies superconducting quantum circuits. He is currently on a half-time leave at UW–Madison and works with Qolab, a quantum computing startup company based in Madison. Plourde was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2024 in the Division of Quantum Information, and in 2023 was elevated to Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. 

“Britton Plourde is internationally recognized for his contributions in the field of low-temperature physics and superconducting quantum circuits,” Black says. “He has made significant contributions in the field of superconducting quantum computing and is best known in the community for his works on superconducting qubits, left-handed and quantum metamaterials, and, more recently, for studies of decoherence sources and suppression of errors in superconducting quantum circuits.”

Natasha Kassulke and Alisa King-Klemperer contributed to this story