Grounded in both physics and chemistry, this program is for graduate students interested in multidisciplinary, rigorous education that crosses traditional academic boundaries.
Students receive a rigorous education in physics and chemistry through formal graduate courses in both disciplines, and a qualifying examination covering both disciplines.
Our students have undergraduate degrees in physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering. They have experience in physical and chemical sciences and interests in a range of scientific topics.
Coursework and research placements are tailored to each student’s background and interests.
There are more than 100 faculty members from seven different academic departments and two research institutes at UMD who participate in the chemical physics program.
Students can also conduct research off-campus in a laboratory at the NIH or NIST. These students are jointly supervised an associated government scientist and a UMD faculty member.
Recent graduate placements include NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Cambridge University, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, UC Berkeley, Stanford University and MIT.
Meet our current graduate students and check out what they're up to.
Jamie Luskin
First-author paper in Applied Physics Letters
"Large active-area superconducting microwire detector array with single-photon sensitivity in the near-infrared"
Yijia Xu
First-author paper in PRX Quantum
"Qubit-Oscillator Concatenated Codes: Decoding Formalism and Code Comparison"
Qingfeng Kee Wang
"Cross-platform comparison of arbitrary quantum states" in Nature Communications
Benjamin Eller, Jacob Fortner
Benjamin Eller (first author) and Jacob Fortner (second author) paper in Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter
"Can armchair nanotubes host organic color centers?"
