Kenji Yasuda, assistant professor in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell Duffield Engineering, has received two international honors this year recognizing his research in quantum materials and next-generation electronics.
In March, Yasuda was selected as a recipient of the 2026 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, one of the U.S. Department of the Navy’s most prestigious programs for early-career scientists and engineers. The ONR Young Investigator Program supports exceptional scientists at the beginning of their academic careers whose work shows outstanding promise for advancing science and technology relevant to national priorities. Yasuda’s funded project, “Superlubric Sliding Ferroelectrics for Ultralow-Power Nonvolatile Memory,” seeks to develop new materials platforms for highly energy-efficient memory technologies, and could dramatically reduce the energy required to store and process information while retaining data without continuous power.
This project aligns closely with his lab’s vision of translating discoveries in quantum materials into functional devices for information storage and computing. By integrating expertise in materials design, nanofabrication and quantum physics, Yasuda’s team seeks to develop technologies that surpass the limitations of conventional semiconductor electronics.
Yasuda was also recently awarded the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Early Career Scientist Prize in Semiconductors for 2025, recognizing the impact of Yasuda’s contributions to semiconductor and quantum materials physics. This award is given annually to researchers who have made notable advances in semiconductor physics early in their careers.
Before arriving at Cornell in 2024, Yasuda earned his Ph.D. in applied physics from the University of Tokyo in 2018 and conducted postdoctoral research at MIT, where he helped pioneer a new class of artificial ferroelectric materials based on van der Waals heterostructures, an emerging platform that allows researchers to engineer material properties atom by atom. He established an international reputation through his discoveries in topological materials and ferroelectric systems. His work has included the discovery of spintronic functionalities in magnetic topological insulators and pioneering demonstrations of stacking-engineered ferroelectricity in two-dimensional materials.
At Cornell, the Yasuda Lab focuses on designing and discovering novel quantum nanomaterials through artificial heterostructure synthesis. Researchers in the lab explore unconventional ferroelectricity, magnetism, topological states, and other emergent quantum phenomena that could enable transformative technological applications.