Joaquín Drut, Associate Professor and Melchor Fellow, receives the 2018 Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement by Young Faculty. The Hettleman Prize recognizes the achievements of outstanding junior tenure-track faculty or recently tenured faculty.
Joaquín was born and raised in La Plata, Argentina. He moved to the US in 2003 and got his PhD at the University of Washington in 2008. For his PhD work, he received the UW Henderson Prize. Before joining UNC in 2012, Joaquín was a postdoc at Ohio State University and Los Alamos National Laboratory. During that time, he worked on a variety of topics ranging from ultracold atoms to graphene. For his work on the unitary Fermi gas (a model for neutron matter that has been realized in ultracold atom experiments), he received the Hermann Kuemmel Early Achievement Award in Many-Body Physics. Here at UNC, Joaquín leads the ‘Computational Quantum Matter’ group, which focuses on exploring a wide range of quantum many-body problems in a variety of situations, characterizing and predicting their thermodynamic, structure, and quantum-information properties, as well as developing new ways to use computers to that end. Recently, together with his students and colleagues, he has embarked on the exploration of polarized non-relativistic matter. This challenging problem has required exploring creative ways to address the so-called sign problem, which is one of the most puzzling and long-standing issues in computational quantum physics.
Congrats to Joaquín for a job well done!!