Cornell physicist Kenji Yasuda has received a 2026 Packard Fellowship that will provide $985,800 over five years for his work on ultrathin materials. The assistant professor is one of 20 researchers selected nationally for this year's fellowships, Cornell University announced Thursday.
Yasuda works in Cornell's School of Applied and Engineering Physics. His research examines stacks of materials only a few atoms thick and how small shifts between their layers can change electrical behavior.
The Packard Fellowship provides unrestricted support to early-career faculty, allowing them to pursue research that may not fit a narrowly defined project. Yasuda said he plans to investigate how atomic-scale motion can control more complex quantum states and lead to possible device applications.
Moving layers to change electronic behavior
One focus of Yasuda's work is āslidetronics,ā a method that uses electrical voltage to slide thin layers relative to one another. Changing their alignment can alter properties such as ferroelectricity, magnetism and superconductivity, Cornell said.
Those changes could eventually help researchers design memory and electronic devices that can be reconfigured. They remain research goals, not products ready for use.
Yasuda's group studies van der Waals heterostructures, stacks whose layers are held together by relatively weak forces. The interfaces between the layers can display properties that are not present in the individual materials, making their arrangement central to the experiments.
Cornell published separate research this week in which Yasuda and colleagues used voltage to switch a four-layer graphene structure between magnetic and nonmagnetic states. The fellowship is a new award for Yasuda's broader work, not a second announcement of that single study.
Fellowship supports longer-term questions
Yasuda joined Cornell's faculty in 2024 after a postdoctoral appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on artificial ferroelectrics made from layered materials. He said the fellowship will give his students and collaborators room to explore friction and movement at the atomic scale along with more unusual quantum states.
Chris Xu, director of the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, said the award recognizes Yasuda's work at the intersection of physics and engineering. Cornell has had other Packard fellows in engineering, including faculty selected in 2021, 2019 and 2017.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation selects early-career professors for the program. This year's award gives Yasuda five years of flexible funding to test ideas whose eventual uses are still uncertain.
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