June 2012 Woman Physicist of the Month - Ana Maria Rey

Ana Maria Rey is an extraordinary theorist working on a remarkable number of diverse complicated problems.  While it has been only a few years since her Ph.D. work was awarded the Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Physics Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award (2005), her research has already became instrumental in opening entirely new directions of research.  She has developed numerous collaborations with both experimental and theoretical scientists all around the world.

Dr. Rey joined JILA and the University of Colorado Physics Department at Boulder in 2008 and has built a remarkable group there in just a few short years.  Her research interests include degenerate Fermi gases and Bose-Einstein condensates, optical lattices, quantum phase transitions, strongly correlated systems, quantum information, quantum simulations, precision measurements, non-equilibrium phenomena, entanglement generation, quantum magnetism, disordered systems, alkaline earth atoms, and polar molecules.  Many of these topics are at the interface of AMO and condensed matter physics.  

Dr. Rey is a persistent and productive researcher.  For example, she has 14 peer-review publications in 2011 alone, five of which were published in Physical Review Letters and one in Science!  She has given numerous invited talks at conferences, colloquia, and seminars in the U.S. and abroad.  Her remarkable passion and enthusiasm for physics is truly inspiring.