The Materials Research Society’s (MRS) Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award recognizes outstanding, interdisciplinary scientific work in materials research by an early career scientist or engineer who shows exceptional promise as a developing leader in the materials area.
MRS will award Prineha Narang, Harvard University, at the 2022 MRS Spring Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, during which Narang will present a lightning talk, Illuminating Quantum Matter, and participate in a panel session with fellow award recipients.
Narang was selected “for critical advances in the understanding of materials physics, optical sciences and topology for the prediction and design of quantum materials.”
Narang is a 2022 MRS Spring Meeting Chair and is an invited speaker in Symposium QT01: Applications and Characterization of Nonequilibrium Electron, Phonon and Polaron Dynamics and Symposium QT07: Atomic and Molecular Quantum Systems and Defect Engineering for Quantum Technologies.
Narang is an assistant professor at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University where she leads an interdisciplinary group of students and postdocs addressing fundamental questions in theoretical and computational materials science. Prior to joining the faculty, Narang was a Ziff Fellow at HUCE and worked as a research scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received MS and PhD degrees in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology.
Narang’s work has been recognized by many awards and special designations including the Mildred Dresselhaus Prize, Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Max Planck Sabbatical Award from the Max Planck Society, and the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics, all in 2021; an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, Moore Inventor Fellow by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for pioneering innovations in quantum science, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review (MIT TR35). Outside of science, she is an avid triathlete and runner.
About the Materials Research Society
MRS is an organization of over 13,000 materials researchers from academia, industry and government worldwide, and a recognized leader in promoting the advancement of interdisciplinary materials research and technology to improve the quality of life. MRS members are students and professionals hailing from physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and engineering—the full spectrum of materials research. Headquartered in Warrendale, Pennsylvania (USA), MRS membership now spans 90 countries, with approximately 45 percent of members residing outside the United States.
MRS serves and engages members across generations to advance their careers and promote materials research and innovation. The Society produces high-quality meetings and publications, assuring that members of all career stages can present and publish their most important and timely work to an international and interdisciplinary audience. MRS continues to expand its professional development portfolio, as well as promote diversity and inclusion in the scientific workforce, with career services for researchers worldwide. The Society advocates for the importance of scientific research and innovation to policymakers and the community. And the MRS Awards program honors those whose work has already had a major impact in the field, as well as those whose work shows great promise for future leadership.
For more information about the Materials Research Society visit
mrs.org and follow
@Materials_MRS.