Rate My Professor Sufei Shi

Sufei Shi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in Condensed Matter Physics. He earned a B.S. in Physics from Nanjing University and a Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University. From 2011 to 2015, Shi served as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He then joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in 2015, advancing to Associate Professor in 2021. In 2023, he became Associate Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Shi’s research integrates nanomaterial synthesis using mechanical exfoliation and chemical vapor deposition to produce atomically thin two-dimensional materials and van der Waals heterostructures; nanoscale fabrication with techniques such as electromigration for atomic-scale devices to probe quantum effects; and advanced electrical and optical measurements, including low-temperature transport, broadband visible-to-terahertz and ultrafast spectroscopy, and time-resolved photocurrent measurements to investigate electron-photon interactions in low dimensions. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2020. In 2025, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation selected him as an Experimental Physics Investigator, awarding $1.3 million over five years to develop scalable quantum simulation platforms via moiré superlattices in atomically thin semiconductors and trapped excitons for studying superconductivity and quantum phenomena. Key publications include book chapters 'Optoelectronics of Graphene' (Oxford University Press, 2017) and 'Excitons in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs)' (Elsevier, 2023); and journal articles such as 'Valley-polarized excitonic Mott insulator in WS2/WSe2 moiré superlattice' (Nature Physics, 2023), 'Excitonic insulator in a heterojunction moiré superlattice' (Nature Physics, 2022), 'Excitonic Complexes in Two-Dimensional Transition Metal Dichalcogenides' (Nature Communications, 2023), 'Quadrupolar excitons and hybridized interlayer Mott insulator in a trilayer moiré superlattice' (Nature Communications, 2023), and 'Exciton Superposition across Moiré States in a Semiconducting Moiré Superlattice' (Nature Communications, 2023). His contributions advance understanding of correlated excitonic and electronic states with implications for quantum technologies.