LAURA KIM, PH.D.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
l.kim@ufl.edu
Dr. Laura Kim is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Florida (UF). Before joining UF in 2024, she was an assistant professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department and a member of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2022-24. Prior to her appointment, she completed her Intelligence Community (IC) Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Quantum Photonics Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Prof. Dirk Englund. She received her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees (Advisor: Prof. Harry Atwater) from the California Institute of Technology in 2013 and 2019, respectively.
She was named a 2020 EECS Rising Star by UC Berkeley and a recipient of the 2023 Nanophotonics Early Career Award, UCLA Faculty Career Award, the IC Postdoctoral Fellowship, Gary Malouf Foundation Award, and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She serves on the Early Career Editorial Advisory Board of Applied Physics Letters.
At UF, she leads the Quantum Materials and Devices Laboratory that focuses on probing elusive light-driven phenomena in quantum-engineered materials and unlocking the next-generation photonic, polaritonic, optoelectronic, and quantum devices. Her research interests span from 2D quantum materials, non-equilibrium carrier dynamics, photonic quasiparticle interactions to quantum sensing, diamond spin microscopy, defect centers in diamonds, metasurfaces, nanophotonics, and plasmonics. Her earlier work was centered around understanding photonic-quasiparticle-driven light-matter interactions in low-dimensional materials. She is the first author of the work that showed the first experimental demonstration of a non-Planckian mid-infrared light-emitting mechanism originating from graphene hot plasmons. Her recent research involves developing programmable spin arrays and optimized spin-photon interfaces for a new type of wide-field, high-speed quantum sensing system. Her work has been reported in Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Nano Letters, ACS Photonics, Nanophotonics, PRB, and JES.