Denisse Córdova Carrizales

About Denisse Córdova Carrizales

Denisse Córdova Carrizales is of Mexican descent and grew up in Houston, Texas where immigrant, especially Mexican, culture is deeply embedded into the fabric of every neighborhood. Many of the people she interacted with—classmates, store clerks, bus drivers—switched fluidly between Spanish and English, the English with a Texan drawl.

From a young age, Denisse read voraciously, sometimes until dawn much to her parents' worry. She was drawn especially to fantasy books and books about the cosmos and the laws governing matter. As a high schooler, she attended the Summer Science Program in Astrophysics, where she calculated the path of a near-Earth asteroid—her first hands-on encounter with the physics she had spent years dreaming about.

Denisse went to Harvard College, graduating in May 2023 with an AB in physics. There, she dove into experimental condensed matter research in Professor Julia Mundy's lab. She also explored research across government and industry settings—at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and VEIR—spanning computational plasma physics and high-temperature superconducting magnet and cable engineering. Her work includes coauthored papers in Nature Physics, Nature Materials, and Advanced Materials with lead-author publications in Nano Letters and Physical Review Materials. In 2023, she received the LeRoy Apker Award from the American Physical Society.

Beyond research, Denisse has advocated for nuclear disarmament and risk reduction in Congress and wrote a piece about the nuclear science stockpile stewardship program. At Harvard, she founded an organization to support first-generation college students studying physics. And in a completely different arena, she performed as the lead in a show off-Broadway in New York City.

Denisse is currently pursuing a PhD in nuclear science and engineering at MIT in Professor Mingda Li's lab, where she received an SM degree in February 2026. She is working on synthesizing and characterizing quantum materials with the goal of bridging fundamental science and industry to make our technology more energy efficient and sustainable.