Physicist Eva Andrei Becomes First Rutgers Professor to Earn Kavli Prize, One of the Highest Honors in Science

The recognition for her foundational work in nanoscience includes a $1 million shared prize

Physicist Eva Andrei, whose groundbreaking research could lead to ultrafast computer chips, highly accurate medical imaging sensors, and more energy-efficient power grids, received the 2026 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience-becoming the first Rutgers faculty member to earn one of the world's most prestigious science awards.

Andrei, a Board of Governors Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is one of only 10 scientists worldwide and the only one in New Jersey named a 2026 Kavli Laureate.

Awarded every two years, the Kavli Prize recognizes researchers whose discoveries in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience have transformed their fields and "broadened our understanding of the big, the small and the complex."

The laureates in each field share a $1 million prize.

"The Kavli award is an exceptional recognition of Eva Andrei's accomplishments that have established a new research field in nanoscale quantum physics and are inspiring scientists across other fields,'' said John P. Hughes, chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. "It is a testament to her creativity, excellent scientific judgement, and experimental skills.'

They will be recognized during a ceremony in September in Oslo, Norway, presided over by the Royal Family. The Kavli Prize is a partnership among the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research and the Kavli Foundation. Since the inception of the award, 10 Kavli laureates have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes.

"Honoring these excellent scientists is not only a recognition of achievements, it is an investment in our shared future, affirming the curiosity, rigor, and courage that drives human progress," said Annelin Eriksen, president of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Andrei will share the Kavli Prize in nanoscience with Pablo Jarillo-Herrero from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Allan H. MacDonald from the University of Texas at Austin, for foundational work that established the field of twistronics, a combination of the words "twist" and "electronics."

"This recognition reflects the work of every student and postdoc who has passed through our group, and especially that of my close collaborator Dr. Guohong Li, who has been an indispensable scientific partner since the earliest days of our moiré discoveries," said Andrei, who earned her doctoral degree in physics from Rutgers in 1982 and has been a faculty member in the School of Arts and Sciences ever since. "Rutgers has been both my scientific home and the place where this field took root - and that means everything to me."

"It also reflects a genuine moment of transformation in our field. Twistronics has brought together condensed matter physicists, materials scientists and quantum engineers in ways that feel genuinely new,'' Andrei said. "To be recognized alongside Allan MacDonald and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, whose contributions have been so complementary to mine, makes it especially meaningful."

Andrei's early research laid the groundwork for twistronics before anyone knew the field would ever exist. Her lab at Rutgers was the first to show that stacking two sheets of graphene - pure carbon, each just one atom thick, arranged in a honeycomb - with a slight twist between them could completely transform their electronic properties.

That twist, applied at a microscopic level, allows scientists to dial a single material from metal to insulator to superconductor simply by adjusting the voltage - a level of control that was previously unimaginable.

"The electronic properties were not just tweaked, they were transformed," Andrei said. "We discovered that the new pattern causes a dramatic reconstruction of how electrons behave, one that depends exquisitely on the angle of the twist."

In 2009 Andrei and her team found that at one very specific angle - 1.07 degrees that was christened the "magic angle" by her Kavli Prize co-recipient MacDonald - the electrons slow down dramatically and start interacting, creating the very best conditions for so called correlated electron states such as superconductivity - a state where certain materials can conduct electricity with zero resistance or energy loss.

"We were tantalizingly close to seeing superconductivity, but our equipment ran just a little too warm. That discovery came in 2018 when by cooling the system to a lower temperature, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero - my other Kavli Prize co-recipient - sparked the field we now call twistronics."

"Imagine a single material that you could reprogram with a battery," Andrei said. "Turn the voltage up a little and it becomes a superconductor. Turn it differently and it becomes an insulator or a magnet. That's what magic-angle twisted graphene lets us do. It's a kind of quantum Swiss Army knife and the twist is what makes it possible."

The idea of twisting two atomically thin sheets of graphene was so fundamentally unheard of in 2009 that when Andrei submitted her findings, the editor of Science magazine refused to send the paper out for peer review. It was eventually published in Nature Physics.

In a remarkable parallel, a separate paper on other graphene research met the same fate at Science and was also rejected without peer review. Eventually published in Nature, it was named Science's Breakthrough of the Year in 2009.

"As a delicious plot twist, the same journal that had refused to send one of Eva Andrei's papers to peer review described that research as the 'scientific breakthrough of the year' in 2009," said Mari-Ann Einarsrud, chair of the Kavli Prize Committee in Nanoscience.

Andrei said scientists have barely scratched the surface of the vast landscape of twisted material and have spent decades trying to understand exotic quantum materials - superconductors, magnets and strange metals - that each behave in bizarre and inexplicable ways. Twistronics, she said, is transforming the ability to answer some of the deepest open questions in physics - and to be potentially able to build new kinds of devices.

"My group at Rutgers will keep pushing into that territory: hunting for new phases of matter, trying to understand the fundamental rules that govern strongly interacting electrons, and building the conceptual framework that will let the next generation go further still," Andrei said. "The best discoveries in twistronics are still ahead of us."

Hughes noted the recognition has added meaning for Andrei and Rutgers because not only does she teach at the university, but she also has a Rutgers degree.

"Eva is a true daughter of Rutgers, starting her career here as a doctoral student and, after a short period of postdoctoral work elsewhere, returning to Rutgers as a faculty member, where she made the groundbreaking discoveries being recognized by the Kavli Prize,'' Hughes said. "Eva's exceptional accomplishments represent the pinnacle of what we can do and show that continuing, even expanding support from Rutgers will drive future ground-breaking discoveries on the banks of the Raritan."