2026-2028 Urbanek Chodorow Fellows Selected

The Department of Applied Physics recently selected the recipients of the Karel Urbanek and Marvin Chodorow Postdoctoral Fellowships for 2026–2028. Created to honor the lives and legacies of these leaders in the field of Applied Physics, these Fellowships provide important postdoctoral opportunities for some of the most promising young researchers in the world today. The Department was recently selected as a recipient of funds from the Advancing Scientific Knowledge Postdoctoral Fellowship. This additional support made it possible for three full postdoctoral fellowships to be awarded.

This year’s recipients are:

Nicolo D'Anna

Nicolo will work with Prof. Aharon Kapitulnik on achieving ultra-fast time-resolved optical interrogation and control of synthetic stacked van-der-Waals systems, with a particular focus on magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene. Nicolo completed his Ph.D. in Experimental Physics at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) and ETHZ in 2022, and has been developing coherent X-ray diffraction techniques to study quantum materials as a postdoc at UC San Diego.

Connor Holland

Connor will work with Prof. Jon Simon to bring advanced quantum control to light, leveraging a first-of-its-kind cavity array in Prof. Jon Simon's group to enable pathfinding investigations into high-rate quantum networking protocols and scalable quantum simulation of materials made of optical photons. Connor will complete his Ph.D. in Physics at Princeton in June 2026. This Fellowship marks a return for him, as he earned both his B.S. and M.S. at Stanford.

Obinna Ukogu

Obinna will work with Profs. Daniel Fisher and Ben Good. His research aims to drive innovative therapies for cancer, autoimmunity, and allergies by uncovering computational principles governing the immune system. He investigates how functional objectives—such as specificity, sensitivity, homeostasis, and metabolic cost—shape immune signaling and decision-making. His fellowship work will integrate these themes to develop mathematical models of immune-mediated homeostasis within barrier tissues across varying spatio-temporal scales. Obinna will complete his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington in June 2026.

We are deeply grateful for the generous support that makes this program possible, and excited to see how this year’s recipients shape the future.