Two Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) physicists have been elected into the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Joel Moore and Joseph W. Orenstein join 120 scientists and engineers from the U.S. and 30 from across the world as new lifelong members and foreign associates.

Joel Moore is a senior faculty scientist in the Materials Sciences Division, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, and the director of the Center for Novel Pathways to Quantum Coherence in Materials. His theoretical work studies the properties of quantum materials, in which interactions between electrons yield new states of matter. He also investigates how quantum physics can lead to new devices for spin-based electronics and quantum sensing.

Before joining Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley in 2002, Moore was a postdoc in the theoretical physics research group at Bell Labs. Moore received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton University in 1995 and spent a Fulbright year abroad before graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Hertz fellowship.

He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a Simons Investigator, and Chern-Simons Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley.

Joseph W. Orenstein is a senior faculty scientist in the Materials Sciences Division and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He has led the development of advanced experimental techniques to investigate how new materials, such as high-temperature superconductors, multiferroics, topological materials, and frustrated magnets, interact with light.

Orenstein earned his Ph.D. in solid state physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980. Before joining Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley in 1990, he was an IBM postdoctoral fellow and a distinguished member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

He received the American Physical Society Isaakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids in 2008.

In 2020, he was honored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with an Experimental Investigators in Quantum Materials (EPIQs) award. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

In addition to Moore and Orenstein, Berkeley Lab Advisory Board members Young-Kee Kim and France Córdova were also elected into the 2022 class.

The NAS was founded in 1863 to provide the country with a non-partisan council of scientific and technological leaders who could lend expertise and advice to the government. Every year, a new class of 120-150 members are elected by existing members in recognition of distinguished achievement in their respective fields. There is now a total of 2,512 active American members and 517 international members.

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Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 14 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab’s facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.