Walter Alexander “Walt” de Heer is a Dutch physicist and nanoscience researcher known for discoveries in the electronic shell structure of metal clusters, magnetism in transition metal clusters, field emission and ballistic conduction in carbon nanotubes, and graphene-based electronics.

Claire Berger is Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research - Néel Institute working at the Georgia Institute of Technology in W. A. de Heer’s group. She obtained the PhD in Physics from the University of Grenoble, France, with a dissertation on the electronic properties of AlMn quasicrystals. She then moved to a postdoc position at the Centre d’Etudes Atomiques, where she produced and studied amorphous films, and was hired as a researcher at the CNRS ‘s Laboratory for Study of Electronic Properties of Solids (LEPES), in Grenoble.

Professor Zangwill earned a B.S. in Physics at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1976. His 1981 Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Pennsylvania introduced the time-dependent density functional method. 

He worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn from 1981-1985 before taking up his present position at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

He was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997 for theoretical studies of epitaxial crystal growth. 

A primary goal of Professor First's research is to develop an understanding of solid-state systems at atomic length scales. The main experimental tools in this pursuit are scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and related techniques such as ballistic electron emission microscopy (BEEM). These methods rely on the quantum-mechanical tunnel effect to obtain atomically-resolved maps of the electronic structure of surfaces, clusters, and buried layers.

Martin Mourigal received the B.S in Materials from Ecole des Mines de Nancy in 2004. He later received his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from Ecole Polytechnique Federale (EPFL) located in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2007 and 2011, respectively. He was also a postdoctoral research fellow in John Hopkins University from 2011 until 2014. He joined Georgia Tech in 2015 and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Physics. Mourigal's lab focuses on the study of collective electronic and magnetic phenomena in quantum materials.

Zhigang Jiang received his B.S. in physics in 1999 from Beijing University and his Ph.D. in 2005 from Northwestern University. He was also a postdoctoral research associate at Columbia University jointly with Princeton University and NHMFL from 2005 till 2008. Jiang is interested in the quantum transport and infrared optical properties of low dimensional condensed matter systems.