UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nitin Samarth, Verne M. Willaman Professor of Physics and professor of materials science and engineering, has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for distinguished contributions to the physical sciences. He is one of 252 leaders in academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, policy, research and science elected in 2026. The induction ceremony for new members will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October.
“Nitin’s research has significantly advanced fundamental understanding and applications of promising spin-related phenomena of quantum materials,” said Tracy Langkilde, Verne M. Willaman Dean of the Eberly College of Science. “He is also a thoughtful and strategic leader and dedicated mentor, who has positively impacted the college community. We are proud that he has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.”
The academy, established by John Adams, John Hancock and 60 other founders of the United States in 1780, was developed to recognize accomplished individuals and engage them in addressing the greatest challenges facing the young republic. The first members elected to the academy included George Washington, who said — in his first annual message to Congress in 1790 — “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
“We celebrate the achievement of each new member and the collective breadth and depth of their excellence — this is a fitting commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary,” said Academy President Laurie Patton. “The founding of the nation and the academy are rooted in the inextricable links between a vibrant democracy, the free pursuit of knowledge and the expansion of the public good.”
Samarth is an internationally recognized condensed matter experimentalist known for his leading contributions to understanding spin-dependent physical phenomena in quantum materials. He has developed diverse new families of materials platforms using a technique called molecular beam epitaxy. This work contributed to the birth of two major fields of study: semiconductor quantum spintronics and topological spintronics. The principal discoveries enabled by his materials synthesis are the observation of long-lived spin coherence in semiconductors, which was published in Science in 1997, and efficient spin-charge conversion in topological insulators, which was published in Nature in 2014. Samarth has played a key role in the materials community at Penn State and beyond as a co-principal investigator and associate director of the 2D Crystal Consortium, a U.S. National Science Foundation–funded national user facility that works to advance the frontiers of two-dimensional quantum materials.
Samarth has published 300 papers in leading scientific journals, and his research has been featured on the cover of Nature, Science and Scientific American. He has written and co-authored highly cited reviews in Science, Reviews of Modern Physics, Nature Materials and Nature Reviews Materials. He is a co-editor of a widely used book on semiconductor spintronics and has communicated scientific advances in popular venues such as Scientific American and NPR. Samarth has held leadership roles in the American Physical Society (APS), including on the chair-line of the Division of Materials Physics from 2017 to 2021 and the chair-line of APS March Meeting since 2024, co-chairing the APS Global Summit in 2026. He served as the George A. and Margaret M. Downsbrough Department Head of Physics at Penn State from 2011 to 2023.
Samarth is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the APS. His awards and honors include the Distinguished Science Alumni Award from the Purdue University College of Science in 2026, the Adler Lectureship Award from APS in 2023, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in 2019, an Outstanding Physics Alumni Award from Purdue University in 2008, a Faculty Scholar Medal in the Physical Sciences from Penn State in 2008, a George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching from Penn State in 2007, and a Society of Physics Students Annual Award for Excellence in Physics Teaching from Penn State in 1993.
Prior to joining the Penn State faculty in 1992, Samarth was a faculty fellow in the physics department at the University of Notre Dame. He earned a doctoral degree in physics at Purdue University in 1986 and an undergraduate degree in physics at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay in 1980.