Prof. Dr. Kin Fai Mak
Curriculum Vitae
Kin Fai Mak gained his B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2005 and his Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University in 2010. He remained as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia until 2012, when he joined the Kevli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science. In 2014, Kin Fai Mak became Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University, then returned to Cornell 2018 as Assistant Professor. There, he became Associate Professor in 2019 and Full Professor in 2022. He has been director at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter since mid-2024.
Research Interests
Kin Fai Mak and his wife Jie Shan, who is also director at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, are researching correlated and topological phenomena in 2D materials. Well-known examples of this are superconductivity and magnetism. The 2D materials are created by detaching individual stable layers with atomic thickness from various crystals, which consist of layers with atomic thickness, and stacking them on top of each other. The resulting heterostructures exhibit remarkable physical properties that do not occur in the original crystals.
Selected Awards
The honors of Kin Fai Mak include Fellowships of the Packard Foundation (2016) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2017). In 2016 he received the OCPA Outstanding Young Researcher Award, in 2019 the Presidential Early Careers Awards for Scientists and Engineers and in 2021 the American Physical Society Fellowship. In 2022 he was awarded a $1.25 million grant by the Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative.