Rate My Professor Chetan Dhital

Chetan Dhital is an associate professor of physics in the Department of Physics at Kennesaw State University, where he joined the faculty in 2018. Born in Nepal, he completed his BS in Physical Science and MS in Physics from Tribhuvan University in 1999 and 2005, respectively. Dhital earned his PhD in Physics from Boston College in 2014, supervised by Dr. Stephen D. Wilson, with a dissertation entitled 'Combined Transport, Magnetization and Neutron Scattering Study of Correlated Iridates and Iron Pnictide Superconductors.' Post-graduation, he held postdoctoral positions at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 2014 to 2015 and at Louisiana State University from 2015 to 2018 under Prof. John DiTusa. Prior to his doctoral studies, he served as a physics lecturer at Damak Multiple Campus in Nepal from 2005 to 2008.

As an experimental condensed matter physicist, Dhital investigates materials and phenomena driven by underlying physics with potential technological applications, focusing on non-centrosymmetric compounds that host multiferroicity, superconductivity, magnetic skyrmions, and Weyl fermions. His experimental approaches include bulk single crystal synthesis via high-temperature solid-state reactions, measurements of magnetic susceptibility, magnetization, resistivity, and neutron and x-ray scattering conducted at facilities such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dhital has secured funding from the National Science Foundation for condensed matter physics research and, in 2025, a three-year $799,934 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy with Dr. Madalynn Marshall for energy-efficient technologies. His scholarly output includes publications such as 'Entropic signatures of the skyrmion lattice phase in MnSiAl and FeCoSi' (Physical Review B, 2020), 'Unpinning the skyrmion lattice in MnSi: Effect of substitutional disorder' (Physical Review B, 2019), 'Exploring the origins of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in MnSi' (Physical Review B, 2017), and 'Observation of Dirac node formation and mass acquisition in a topological crystalline insulator' (Science, 2014). His work has earned over 1,997 citations. Awards include the GMAG outstanding graduate dissertation award (APS March Meeting, 2014) and DMP postdoctoral travel award (APS March Meeting, 2018). At KSU, he teaches introductory physics, thermal physics, and laboratories, and contributes to department committees, peer review for journals like Physical Review B, and undergraduate research judging.