Only 20 scientists in the country receive a Packard Fellowship each year, and one of them now works at Stony Brook. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has named Nathanan Tantivasadakarn, an assistant professor in Stony Brook University's C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics and Astronomy, a 2026 Packard Fellow, the university announced on October 22.

The fellowship carries an individual grant of $985,834 paid out over five years, and it comes with almost no strings. Fellows can spend the money in whatever way best advances their research, a design the foundation chose so that the country's most promising young scientists and engineers could take risks and follow questions that conventional funding tends to avoid.

Twenty scientists, fifty invited universities

The Packard Foundation selects just 20 Fellows each year, drawn from a pool of nominees at 50 invited institutions. Past recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physics and to be elected to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

Tantivasadakarn was selected for his work in condensed matter theory and quantum information. His research spans topological phases of matter, quantum error correction and quantum computation, non-equilibrium quantum dynamics and generalized symmetries, the mathematical structures that describe how exotic states of matter behave and how a quantum computer can be protected from its own fragility.

That last problem is one of the central obstacles in the field. Quantum computers store information in states so delicate that stray heat or vibration can scramble a calculation, and error correction is the branch of theory working out how to catch and fix those errors faster than they accumulate. Progress there is a prerequisite for the machines the technology industry is spending billions to build, which is part of why a theorist working on it at 50 invited universities can find himself on a list of 20.

A new arrival at the Yang Institute

The award lands early in Tantivasadakarn's Stony Brook career. He joined the faculty recently after serving as a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar, and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, named for the Nobel laureate who taught at Stony Brook for more than three decades, is now home to his research group.

The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, David Wrobel, said the recognition reflects the university's standing in condensed matter theory and quantum information, two areas where Stony Brook has built deep expertise. George Sterman, the director of the Yang Institute, called Tantivasadakarn one of the brightest young researchers working in quantum information science and condensed matter physics today.

What the money will do on Long Island

Tantivasadakarn said he plans to use the fellowship's freedom to train a new generation of researchers at Stony Brook who can move between physics, mathematics and engineering, fields that quantum science increasingly requires scientists to speak fluently at once.

The fellowship adds to a run of quantum momentum at the university, which has been expanding its research footprint in quantum information science in recent years. The institute that now houses his group carries its own weight in that story: it is named for Chen Ning Yang, the Nobel laureate in physics who spent more than three decades on the Stony Brook faculty and helped put the university's theoretical physics program on the world map.

For readers who want to follow the work, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Yang Institute both publish news of public lectures and colloquia on the university's events calendar, many of them free and open to the community.

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