The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has named Kamenetska, an associate professor of chemistry, physics, and materials science and engineering at Boston University, to its 2026 cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators. The foundation describes the program as supporting a distinguished group of mid-career researchers pushing the boundaries of experimental physics, and the recognition comes with substantial practical weight: $1.35 million in research funding. Kamenetska was one of 21 investigators selected in the 2026 round, a cohort drawn from institutions across the United States. The foundation itself was established in 2000 by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, the author of the famous observation about the exponential growth of computing power that became known as Moore’s Law, and his wife Betty, and it has since become one of the most influential private backers of basic science in the country.

Kamenetska’s laboratory occupies an unusual position at the intersection of three disciplines. Trained in experimental physics but holding appointments in chemistry, physics, and materials science and engineering, she approaches molecules the way an engineer approaches a machine: as objects whose parts can be measured, tested, and ultimately controlled. Her research focuses on the intermolecular interface—the region where two molecules meet, exchange electrons, and transmit energy. These junctions are the critical points in molecular electronics, in the energy-transfer cascades of photosynthesis, in the chemical reactions that power living cells, and in the sensors that convert molecular binding events into measurable signals. Understanding what happens at these meeting points, she argues, is fundamental to building both better devices and better diagnostics.

The technical challenge is formidable. A single molecular junction is far too small to image with conventional light microscopy, because visible light has wavelengths hundreds of times larger than the object being studied. Researchers in this field therefore rely on indirect electrical measurements, scanning probe techniques, and increasingly on optical methods that exploit the quantum properties of light itself. Kamenetska’s group has built a reputation for designing new instruments and measurement schemes that combine these approaches, allowing them to correlate the structure of a molecular junction with its electronic and optical behavior. That combination—synthesizing molecules, wiring them into circuits or suspending them between electrodes, and then interrogating them with light—requires expertise that few laboratories possess under one roof.

With the Moore Foundation support, Kamenetska and her team plan to push their measurements into a new regime using ultrafast laser spectroscopy. The technique relies on laser pulses that last femtoseconds—quadrillionths of a second—brief enough to capture the motion of electrons and the vibrations of chemical bonds as they happen. By firing sequences of these ultrashort pulses at nanoscale systems and recording how the material responds, researchers can reconstruct the choreography of energy flow: how a photon’s energy is absorbed, how it migrates through a molecule or across an interface, and how it is ultimately converted into heat, charge, or emitted light. Applied to single molecules and molecular junctions, this approach promises to reveal interactions between light and matter at a level of detail that has remained out of reach.

The potential applications extend well beyond the laboratory bench. Kamenetska notes that the interaction of light and matter on the nanoscale forms the foundation of modern electronics and other emerging technologies. Better control over these interactions could sharpen the resolution of imaging systems, enable sensors capable of detecting individual molecules in biological samples, and contribute to the development of quantum technologies, where the coherent manipulation of single quantum systems is the essential requirement. In biological diagnostics, for example, a technique that can read out the optical response of a single molecule bound to a target could allow earlier and more sensitive detection of disease markers than current methods, which rely on amplifying signals from large numbers of molecules.

Such ambition carries real scientific risk, and Kamenetska is candid about it. The experiments her team plans have never been done before, she says, and the outcome is not certain. This is precisely the kind of high-risk, high-reward research that the Moore Foundation’s investigator program is designed to support. Unlike conventional federal grants, which often favor projects with predictable outcomes and detailed preliminary data, the investigator awards are intended to give established researchers the freedom to take chances on ideas that might fail but that could open entirely new fields if they succeed. For Kamenetska, that freedom is the most valuable part of the award. It is inspiring, she says, to have a foundation take a chance on her ideas and to have an opportunity to make them real in the lab, allowing her team to develop new expertise and to think in new creative ways.

The funding will also have an impact on the people doing the work. Kamenetska plans to expand training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at the forefront of modern quantum optics and materials research. Her laboratory operates on a deliberately convergent model, drawing on tools and expertise from experimental physics, synthetic chemistry, computational chemistry, and materials processing. Students in the group learn to design and synthesize molecules, to build and align laser systems, to model quantum processes computationally, and to fabricate and characterize nanoscale devices. That breadth of training is increasingly seen as essential for scientists entering fields where the boundaries between physics, chemistry, and engineering are dissolving, and it is a model that awards like this one help sustain.

Kamenetska is emphatic that the recognition belongs as much to her students as to herself. She says she would not be able to do this work without the amazing graduate and undergraduate students in her lab, and describes the award as, in many ways, a recognition of their work and of what it has allowed her to imagine her laboratory can do. She also hopes the award draws attention to a broader structural issue: the critical importance of supporting fundamental science research and maintaining fundamental science departments such as physics and chemistry, which she describes as the backbone of many disciplines and the magnet that draws bright young people to universities, enabling this kind of research in the first place.

As one of 21 investigators in the 2026 cohort, Kamenetska joins a community of researchers whose work spans condensed matter physics, quantum information, optics, and biophysics. The program’s philosophy is that progress in experimental physics often comes not from theory alone but from the patient, inventive work of building instruments capable of asking questions no one has asked before. For a laboratory that builds its own tools to watch single molecules interact with light, a five-year commitment of this kind is more than financial support. It is a license to attempt the experiments that have never been done, in the knowledge that even the failures will teach something new about the smallest interfaces in nature—and that the successes could reshape how we image, sense, and engineer the world at the nanometer scale.

Subject of Research: Nanoscale light-matter interactions and single-molecule spectroscopy

Article Title: Boston University researcher wins Moore Foundation Award to push “boundaries of experimental physics”

Article References: Boston University researcher wins Moore Foundation Award to push “boundaries of experimental physics”. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Maria Kamenetska, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Experimental Physics Investigators, ultrafast laser spectroscopy, nanoscale, single molecules, molecular junctions, quantum technology, biological diagnostics, Boston University, quantum optics, fundamental science funding

The Moore Foundation’s Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative was built around a simple observation. Mid-career scientists are often at their most creative precisely when conventional grant structures become most restrictive, demanding detailed promises about outcomes before exploratory work can begin. “From the start, our aim has been to accelerate progress at the frontier of experimental physics by giving brilliant mid-career scientists the kind of flexible, sustained support that federal grants rarely can,” said Theodore Hodapp, program director for the initiative. “That freedom lets them take on risky, high-reward experiments and follow ideas when research results lead them down new pathways.”

Cui’s winning proposal, titled “Nanoscale microwave spectroscopy of collective modes in two-dimensional many-body electronic and excitonic systems,” sounds forbidding, but the physics at its core is one of the most consequential questions in condensed matter science: what happens when electrons, normally treated as independent particles, stop behaving independently and begin acting as a single, coordinated whole? In ordinary metals and semiconductors, electrons zip past one another with relatively weak mutual influence. In certain carefully engineered materials, however, the forces between electrons become so strong that the entire electron population reorganizes into exotic collective states, including phases that behave like crystals made purely of charge and others governed by bound pairs of particles rather than free carriers.

Among the most tantalizing of these states is the excitonic phase. In a solid such as a semiconductor or insulator, an electron excited to a higher energy state leaves behind a hole, the absence of an electron that behaves like a positive charge. The negatively charged electron and positively charged hole can bind to each other through electrostatic attraction, forming a neutral composite particle called an exciton. In an excitonic phase, vast numbers of these bound pairs condense into a collective quantum state, in loose analogy to the way photons lock step inside a laser. The result is a material through which energy can propagate without any net electrical charge being transported, a property that has fascinated theorists since the 1960s and that remains extraordinarily difficult to observe and control in the laboratory.

What has changed, Cui argues, is the arrival of a new experimental toolkit. “Recent advances in 2D materials device engineering have enabled devices in which electron interactions can dominate — opening an important experimental regime that has historically been difficult to access,” he said. Two-dimensional materials, the family that includes graphene and atomically thin semiconductors such as tungsten disulfide, can be isolated as layers a single atom or molecule thick and then stacked like atomic LEGO bricks. Because the layers are so thin, electrons are confined to a plane, which amplifies the relative strength of their mutual repulsion. By tuning the density of electrons, applying electric fields, and twisting or aligning adjacent layers, researchers can now push devices into regimes where interactions, rather than the underlying crystal structure, dictate the physics.

Cui’s laboratory has spent years building exactly this kind of capability. His group fabricates specialized devices from atomically thin materials and develops experimental techniques capable of probing collective modes at the appropriate time and length scales. The new grant will center on nanoscale microwave spectroscopy, a technique that uses microwave-frequency electromagnetic fields to interrogate how charge excitations move and oscillate within a material at extremely small dimensions. Because collective states such as electron crystals and excitonic condensates respond to electromagnetic probes in characteristic ways, spectroscopy of this kind can reveal their signatures — how rigidly the electrons organize, how quickly disturbances propagate, and where the boundaries between competing phases lie.

The payoff from mapping these collective modes could be substantial. “Such discoveries could ultimately help guide future efforts to develop high-performance quantum technologies and electronic devices,” Cui said. The connection is more than speculative. Excitonic systems carry energy without charge flow, hinting at dissipationless signal transmission; correlated electron phases underpin some of the most celebrated phenomena in modern physics, including superconductivity and the fractional quantum Hall effect, the latter now a foundation for emerging approaches to topological quantum computation. Understanding the fundamental principles that govern how novel electronic phases emerge from strong interactions is therefore both a question of basic science and a potential roadmap for the next generation of technology.

The $1.35 million award will do more than fund experiments. It will support graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in Cui’s group, sustaining the training pipeline for a field where hands-on expertise in device fabrication and precision measurement is scarce and highly sought after. The funding will also allow the laboratory to acquire specialized, state-of-the-art instrumentation that would be difficult to justify through conventional grant mechanisms, which typically favor incremental, guaranteed results over the construction of new experimental infrastructure.

For Cui, the award’s value lies precisely in the latitude it provides. “This grant provides the crucial support needed to pursue ambitious, high-risk, high-reward research avenues,” he said. “With the support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, we can push into uncharted experimental frontiers and explore bold ideas with high potential for discovery.” That philosophy mirrors the foundation’s broader strategy, which has historically channeled philanthropic capital into areas where the scientific payoff is uncertain but the potential for transformative insight is high, from astronomy to quantum materials.

The selection also marks a notable moment for UC Riverside, a doctoral research university whose campus has built a growing profile in condensed matter and quantum research. As the cohort of 21 new investigators begins its five-year terms, the collective bet is that flexible support for mid-career experimentalists will yield discoveries that no one can yet specify in a grant proposal — the electron crystals, excitonic condensates, and as-yet-unimagined collective states hiding inside atomically thin materials, waiting for the right instrument and the right question to bring them into view.

Subject of Research: Experimental study of collective electron and exciton phases in two-dimensional materials using nanoscale microwave spectroscopy

Article Title: UC Riverside physicist selected as an experimental physics investigator by Moore Foundation

Article References: UC Riverside physicist selected as an experimental physics investigator by Moore Foundation. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Yongtao Cui, UC Riverside, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Experimental Physics Investigators, two-dimensional materials, excitonic phase, collective electron states, microwave spectroscopy, condensed matter physics, quantum materials, research funding, device engineering