UBC Blusson QMI Investigator Andrea Damascelli has been named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. Awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Fellowship is a prestigious honour recognizing career achievement and exceptional promise.
Image: Andrea Damascelli, Investigator, UBC Blusson QMI. Credit: Paul Joseph.
“I’m honoured to be awarded this fellowship by the Guggenheim Foundation. I have immense respect for the brilliant, diverse, and highly original community of Guggenheim Fellows, whose work is marked by intellectual depth, creative independence, and a commitment to advancing the boundaries of knowledge,” said Andrea Damascelli.
A global leader in advanced photoemission and x-ray techniques, Damascelli has transformed the scientific community’s understanding of high-temperature superconductors and quantum materials. His research group is renowned for its work using time-, spin-, and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (Time+Spin+ARPES), a highly sophisticated technique that images the energy and velocity of electrons as they propagate through materials. This information is essential for understanding novel quantum materials and enabling their use in emerging quantum technologies.
“The fellowship will support an exciting project, where my group explores an experimental approach to perform two-electron angle-resolved photo-emission spectroscopy (2e-ARPES) on quantum materials. This effort involves developing new spectroscopic tools alongside theoretical and computational advances, and bringing together international collaborators to tackle some of the most challenging questions in condensed matter physics today,” Damascelli said.
Throughout his career, Damascelli has helped establish ARPES as a reliable and mature tool for mapping electronic behaviours in quantum materials. He has pioneered time-, spin-, and microscale-resolved enhancements to ARPES, developing novel, bespoke instruments along the way—always striving toward the goal of more comprehensively revealing the detailed electronic structure of quantum materials.
“In a typical ARPES experiment, we can only measure one electron at a time after it’s ejected from the material by our lasers. All my research over the past 30 years has been building toward 2e-ARPES, where we aim to detect, for the first time, two connected electrons at once and capture how they interact as a pair,” Damascelli said.
“Imagine a flock of birds: when one moves, everything else responds. We are interested in understanding that kind of collective behaviour, but at the level of electrons and many-body systems.”
Damascelli is also highly regarded as a dedicated mentor, known for fostering collaboration and supporting the next generation of researchers.
Please join us in congratulating Andrea on this well-deserved recognition!
About the Guggenheim Foundation
Created and initially funded in 1925 by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”
Since its establishment, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted nearly $450 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. The Fellowship is application-based, and open to U.S. and Canadian citizens or permanent residents.
The Guggenheim Foundation centers the talents and instincts of the Fellows, whose passions often have broad and immediate social impact. For example, in 1936, Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and dedicated it to the Foundation’s first president, Henry Allen Moe. Photographer Robert Frank’s seminal book, The Americans, was the product of a cross-country tour supported by two Guggenheim Fellowships. The accomplishments of other early Fellows like e.e. cummings, Jacob Lawrence, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Martha Graham, and Linus Pauling also demonstrate the strength of the Guggenheim Foundation’s core values and the power and impact of its approach.
