Shiwei Zhang, Ph.D.

Shiwei Zhang is a Senior Research Scientist/Group Leader at the Center for Computational Quantum Physics. He is also Chancellor Professor of Physics at the College of William & Mary. Shiwei received his Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University in 1993. After two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Research Associate and then a year at Ohio State University as an NSF CISE Postdoctoral Fellow and University Postdoctoral Fellow, he joined the William & Mary faculty in 1996. Shiwei has held visiting positions at many institutions including the University of Illinois, SISSA at Trieste, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Shiwei has received a number of awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the Cottrell Scholar Award, and the William and Mary Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Shiwei’s research goal is to help solve significant problems in condensed matter and materials physics by fundamentally advancing our computational capabilities. He has focused on treating many electron systems and has done pioneering work in the development and application of innovative new algorithmic approaches for quantum Monte Carlo methods. Methods he developed have been applied in condensed matter, quantum chemistry, ultra-cold atoms, and nuclear physics. Shiwei and his group perform both materials-specific, first-principles electronic structure calculations and model simulations of strongly correlated systems.