Physics at Brown
In the most recent ranking of graduate programs, Brown Physics ranked in the top 12 percent by US News & World Report, reflecting the department's strength in research, teaching and student excellence.
The recognition aligns with a period of sustained activity across the department, including faculty leadership on the national stage, such as Prof. Brad Marston's APS presidency and research awards, and Loukas Gouskos' prestigious Department of Energy grant for research at the Large Hadron Collider.
Recent faculty research recognition includes contributions to international collaborations at CERN, including the CMS Collaboration; work on the Large Hadron Collider experiment, which was awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with significant contributions from Brown student researchers, according to Greg Landsberg, who was among Brown faculty working on the LHC; discoveries in quantum mehanics and interdisciplinary research spanning particle physics and data-driven approaches.
Student excellence elevates the department to the top tier of graduate programs through research, conference participation spanning the globe and recognition for outstanding achievements, such as Ph.D. student Ilija Nikolov's award-winning poster at the 824 WE-Heraeus Seminar on Electronic Order in Kagome Metals and recent graduate Shounak De's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) Graduate Fellowship (2025), and Brown students being awarded the prestigious STEM Chateaubriand Fellowship an astonishing two years in a row: Calvin Bales in 2023 - 2024 and Ilija Nikolov in 2024 - 2025.
Student-driven research has led to groundbreaking discoveries, such as those of recent graduates Naiyuan Zhang, Ron Nguyen and Navketan Batra, who worked with Professor Dima Feldman to discover a new class of particles in quantum mechanics.