Pengcheng Dai

Pengcheng Dai, the Sam and Helen Worden Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, is an experimental physicist and academic. He is most known for his research in the field of unconventional superconductivity and has contributed to comprehending the role of magnetic excitations in unconventional super conductors including copper, iron, and heavy fermion unconventional superconductors. His undertakings at Rice include research on condensed matter physics and a materials growth laboratory that produces high-quality single crystals of correlated electron materials.

Dai co-edited the book, Iron-based Superconductors: Materials, Properties and Mechanisms, and is the recipient of Heike Kamerlingh, Onnes Prize. He also made contributions to topological spin excitations in honeycomb/kagome lattice magnets and studied spin dynamics in colossal magnetoresistance manganites.

He obtained his Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics from the University of Missouri in Columbia and completed his post-doc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and became a staff scientist there before beginning his academic career.