About Us

The Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign— ranked among the top ten in the U.S. by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences—is physics on the cutting edge of research and education. Our mission is to serve the people of the State of Illinois, the nation, and the world through leadership in physics research, science education, public outreach, and professional service.

Physics is the study of the fundamental interactions of matter, energy, space, and time, and the laws of physics underlie all other natural science and engineering disciplines. Many familiar technologies upon which our modern lives depend—integrated circuits, optical communications, magnetic storage media, lasers, LEDs, medical imaging, the satellite-based Global Positioning System, and the Internet—have grown from fundamental research in physics.

Today’s physicists increasingly apply precise instrumentation and sophisticated computational tools to problems in nanotechnology, biology, environmental science, and quantum information, in addition to traditional physics subdisciplines such as particle, optical, atomic, and materials physics.

Our department has strong research programs in many of the major fields of the discipline, including atomic, molecular, and optical physics, condensed matter physics, high-energy physics, nuclear/intermediate energy physics, biological physics, astrophysics, general relativity, and cosmology, quantum information, complex systems and chaos, and mathematical physics.

Faculty members, postdoctoral research associates, graduate students, and, increasingly, undergraduate students carry out research in a variety of state-of-the-art facilities: Loomis Laboratory; interdisciplinary facilities on campus such as the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; and national and international laboratories such as Fermilab, Argonne National Laboratory, Jefferson National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Centre Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), and the Paul Scherrer Institute.

The department is home to a National Institutes of Health national resource, the Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics and to Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher Taekjip Ha. Support for research and educational initiatives comes from numerous external supporters, including the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation, the State of Illinois, the American Chemical Society, the Carver Charitable Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Agilent Technologies, IBM Corporation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Research Corporation, the Searle Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, Shell Foundation, the A.P. Sloan Foundation, Sony Corporation, and Xerox Corporation.