Mansour Shayegan

Mansour Shayegan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and also of physics at Princeton University, explores the physics of semiconductors, with a focus on their electronic properties. His lab grows exceptionally pure semiconductor samples and studies them to observe subatomic particles and their interactions. In a 2021 project, his lab created the world’s purest sample of gallium arsenide, a semiconductor used in devices that power technologies like cell phones and satellites. He observed unexpected behavior under relatively weak magnetic fields. These observations had no established theoretical framework, and opened new ground for physicists to explore.

Shayegan earned his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has received Princeton’s Graduate Mentoring Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Humboldt Prize and a Fulbright Fellowship, among others. Shayegan is a Gordon and Betty Moore Materials Synthesis Investigator and an elected fellow of the American Physical Society.