David Awschalom is the Liew Family Professor and Vice Dean for Research for the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and Director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. He is also the inaugural director of Q-NEXT, one of the US Department of Energy Quantum Information Science Research Centers. Before arriving in Chicago, he was the Director of the California NanoSystems Institute and Professor of Physics, Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California – Santa Barbara. He served as a Research Staff and Manager at the IBM Watson Research Center. He works in spintronics and quantum information engineering, exploring the quantum states of electrons, nuclei, and photons in semiconductors and molecules for quantum information processing.

Awschalom received the American Physical Society Oliver Buckley Prize and Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize, the European Physical Society Europhysics Prize, the Materials Research Society David Turnbull Award and Outstanding Investigator Prize, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the International Magnetism Prize from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and the European Academy of Sciences. Dr. Awschalom recently received a US Secretary of Energy Achievement Award.