A wonderful way to look at the world.

Catherine Kallin, Physics Alumna, Outstanding Alumni Award recipient

Catherine Kallin is a theoretical physicist, and the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Materials Theory at McMaster University. She joined the McMaster faculty in 1984 after receiving her PhD in Physics from Harvard and completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. Her field of study is novel electron behaviours in materials. She has spent sabbaticals at Bell Labs, Cornell, UBC, and is currently on a fellowship visiting Stanford University where she is working in the area of topological superconductivity – working with materials that conduct electricity with no loss of energy.

“My work is informed by experimentalists, people who work in the laboratory who measure things, and discover new materials and new phenomena. There are materials that are thought to exhibit this type of superconductivity and I’m working hard to see if the theory and experiment bear this out.

“When I started at Langara, I was not only neutral, but I had been turned off of physics. My instructor introduced me to how interesting physics is, what a wonderful way to look at the world and use mathematics to understand the world around us.”

Catherine has held the Sloan, Steacie, and Guggenheim Fellowships and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Catherine has recently been named a Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics, the only Canadian among 14 North Americans in 2016 to receive this prestigious honour.