Grace Pan

About Grace Pan

Grace Pan is an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Berkeley. She is interested in designing and constructing new materials at the atomic-scale, both as probes for fundamental interactions in physics and as platforms for quantum information technologies.

Grace was born in the California Bay Area to parents who emigrated from China with just seventy dollars in cash and a yearning for the nebulous ideas of freedom and choice. While her parents had little science background or understanding of the American education system, their unyielding support along with the communal resources of the striving Chinese diasporic community enabled Grace to pursue her broad interests in everything from experimental physics to bird migration.

Grace received her BS in physics, summa cum laude, from Yale University, where she studied the collective behavior of electrons in materials at ultra-low temperatures. After a season as a field assistant studying avian island biogeography and locomotion in Paraguay, Grace continued on to her PhD in Physics at Harvard University. At Harvard, she discovered a new family of unconventional superconducting materials, work that was recognized by the Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber Prize at Harvard University and The University of Chicago Quantum Creators Prize.  

Valuing her practice of science as a privilege of self-expression not afforded to her parents’ generation, Grace aspires to be a scholar capable of exploring the full combinatoric space of quantum materials while improving science accessibility for all.