Yinming Shao named Downsbrough Early Career Professor of Physics
Yinming Shao, assistant professor of physics at Penn State, has been honored with the Downsbrough Early Career Professorship in Physics in recognition of his research contributions, teaching, and service to the Department of Physics and the Eberly College of Science. This professorship was established in 2004 by George A. Downsbrough, a physicist whose extensive volunteer work at Penn State included the Armsby Committee, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, and the Eberly College of Science's Grand Destiny Campaign Committee. Downsbrough was named an honorary alumnus of Penn State in 2003.
In his research, Shao uses techniques called optical spectroscopy and near-field nano-imaging to uncover and control quasiparticles, emergent particle-like excitations that arise from the collective behavior of electrons, spins, and light in layered quantum materials. His work has revealed unique electronic and light-matter behavior, including semi-Dirac fermions in the nodal-line metal and magnetically confined excitons in the antiferromagnetic semiconductors. He also studies polaritons, hybrid quasiparticles formed by light and matter, as nanoscale probes of quantum materials and as a platform for controlling optical responses beyond the diffraction limit.
“Yinming Shao is an exceptionally talented physicist who is rapidly establishing himself as a world leader in the field of optical spectroscopy of quantum materials,” said Mauricio Terrones, George A. and Margaret M. Downsbrough Head of the Department of Physics and Evan Pugh University Professor. “He is a multifaceted researcher working on topological effects, exciton dynamics, hyperbolic materials, polaritons, and the interplay of all of these with magnetism."
In 2025, Shao was awarded an Early Career Research Program award from the Department of Energy and named a Scialog Fellow in Quantum Matter and Information by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. Shao’s research has been published in journals such as Nature Physics, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advance, and Nature Communications.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 2024, Shao was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University from 2020 to 2024. He started his graduate research in physics at University of California San Diego in 2013, before moving to Columbia University in 2017. He earned a doctoral degree in condensed matter physics at Columbia University in 2020, and a bachelor’s degree in physics from Zhejiang University in China in 2013.