Assistant Professor Yi Li has been chosen as a 2020 Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award recipient. This is in recognition of her exceptional work as an early-career investigator, which embodies the spirit of discovery that defines Johns Hopkins University. The 2020 Catalyst Award honorees will each receive a $75,000 grant to support their work over the next year. They also will have the opportunity to participate in mentoring sessions and events designed to connect these colleagues at similar stages in their careers.

As a condensed matter theorist, Li is interested in exploring exotic quantum phases of matter and their organizing principles, particularly novel topological insulators and topological superconductivity in condensed matter and ultra-cold atom systems, itinerant ferromagnetism, as well as non-perturbative analytic and quantum Monte Carlo approaches to strongly correlated quantum systems.