Pontus Laurell joined our department as an assistant professor. Laurell served as a postdoc in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has a bachelor's degree in engineering physics and a master's degree in fundamental physics from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Laurell earned his physics PhD in 2018 from the University of Texas at Austin with Professor Gregory Fiete. He then served as a postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he developed strong collaborations with quantum magnetism experimentalists and a deep interest in applications of quantum information methods to quantum materials and high-performance computing. 

Sam Roland joined our department as an assistant teaching professor. Prior to his arrival, he served as an assistant professor of mathematics and physics at Stephens College. He earned his BA in physics and mathematics from Cornell University and his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Michigan where he investigated the origins of dark matter in the early universe, moments after the big bang. He also led the undergraduate physics labs at the University of Michigan, designing lessons and building equipment for hands-on learning. Before joining Stephens College, Roland worked as a data scientist, applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to fight online credit card fraud. 

Charles Steinhardt joined the department as an assistant professor after serving as an associate professor at the Cosmic Dawn Center, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen where he worked on a variety of problems in high-redshift astrophysics, and other areas of astronomy, astrostatistics, and machine learning. He was a founding member of the Cosmic Dawn Center, a Danish National Research Foundation Center of Excellence hosted by the Niels Bohr Institute and Danish Technical University. He is a co-PI of BUFFALO (Beyond Ultra-deep Frontier Fields And Legacy Observations), an astronomical survey built around the six Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Frontier Fields clusters designed to learn about early galactic assembly and clustering and prepare targets for observations with the James Webb Space Telescope. He received an AB in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University, and SM in Astronomy, SM in Computer Science, and PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University.

Pavlo Sukhachov has accepted the position of George H. Vineyard Assistant Professor of Theoretical Physics and begins in January.  Until then he continues as a Postdoc at the QuSpin Center of Excellence in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He received his PhD from the Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2016. Before joining NTNU in 2024, he held a few postdoctoral positions at Western University (Canada), Nordita (Sweden), Yale University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.