How one APS meeting shaped a career in quantum matter research

On an overcast late afternoon in Portland, Oregon, during a session of the 2010 APS March Meeting, Fan Zhang — then a graduate student in physics at the University of Texas at Austin — stepped up to the podium. He was slated to present his research on rhombohedral graphene, a material that, at the time, was not yet attracting the research interest it does today.

And Zhang was the 12th presenter in a long, 14-talk session. By then, the audience, weary from a busy day, was dwindling.

Undeterred, Zhang described his research on the mechanism by which “electron-electron interactions change the electronic properties of the rhombohedral graphene system,” he says. These interactions, he found, could lead to “exotic” behaviors.

Immediately after the session, the author who presented the 14th talk, Lei Jing, approached Zhang. His research colleagues, Jing said, had recently observed one of the predictions Zhang presented.

The conversation was the first connection of many, borne out of the 2010 session, that would shape Zhang's career for 16 years and counting.

Today, Zhang, a 2025 APS Fellow, leads a theory-based research group at the University of Texas at Dallas. His team studies quantum matter, including rhombohedral graphene. “We predict interesting phenomena and then guide experiments, and sometimes, we try to explain groundbreaking experimental phenomena discovered by colleagues,” he says.

But even now he remembers the 2010 session as a pivotal event in his career.

The brief exchange with Jing led to a career-long collaboration between Zhang and Jing’s doctoral advisor, Chun Ning “Jeanie” Lau, back at the University of California, Riverside. To date, Zhang’s collaboration with Lau has resulted in 15 publications in high-impact journals.

The following year, in 2011, as Zhang was exploring postdoctoral opportunities, his advisor, Allan MacDonald, recommended the research group of Eugene Mele and Charles Kane at the University of Pennsylvania. Zhang realized that he and Mele had presented back-to-back talks at the 2010 March Meeting.

“We had just happened to hear each other’s talks,” Zhang says. “I remember clearly his was about twisted bilayer graphene — what great taste!” (The topic took off in 2018 when Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the group leader of the second talk in the 2010 session, discovered superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene. Five years later, Lau’s and Zhang’s groups elucidated the phenomenon together using quantum geometry.)

Mele and Kane offered Zhang a postdoctoral position at Penn, and their mentorship shaped Zhang’s intellectual approach and research trajectory. Zhang fondly recalls Kane rehearsing a 2013 March Meeting talk. “The two founding fathers of a big field … humbly gave 10-minute talks like students,” he says.

Two years later, Kun Yang, co-author of the eighth talk from the 2010 session, organized an invited March Meeting symposium on rhombohedral bilayer graphene that featured Zhang, Lau, and two other speakers from the 2010 session. It also included Konstantin Novoselov, co-recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, recognized for the discovery of graphene.

“After 20 years, more researchers are working on rhombohedral graphene,” says Zhang. “We’re still at the beginning of a special journey.”

Reflecting on the impact of that one talk at the 2010 March Meeting, Zhang says it’s important for early-career physicists “just to go.” This year, he encouraged everyone in his research group at UT-Dallas to attend the Global Physics Summit in Denver, Colorado.

“Even if you don’t give a talk, even if you don’t understand everything, it’s completely fine,” he says. “Just be there, just listen, and talk to the people in your field … One day, they may become your collaborators, your advisors, your reviewers, and your readers.”