Judy J. Cha

Carol and Douglas Melamed Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science

Judy J. Cha is the Carol and Douglas Melamed Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University.  Prior to Yale, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University in 2009. Her research focuses on synthesis and transport properties of topological and 2D nanomaterials and their phase transformations in order to understand the structure-electronic property relationships of quantum nanomaterials. Her work on topological nanomaterials and 2D materials started ten years ago as a postdoc at Stanford university. At Yale, she has expanded the class of topological nanomaterials she studies, with a particular focus on achieving nanowires of topological superconductors, which have implications for robust quantum computing and quantum information processing. Topological nanomaterials Cha synthesizes have enabled external collaborators to observe novel electronic properties, including a new type of superconductivity that has not been experimentally observed until now. As a principal investigator, she leads research projects supported by NSF, DOE, ARO, NASA, SRC, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and Moore Foundation.