This semester, the Department of Physics & Astronomy welcomes new faculty member Dr. Zhehao Dai, who will serve as an Assistant Professor. We asked him ten questions to get to know him better. Read his answers below.
- Who do you most admire? Enrico Fermi
- What is your idea of happiness? Satisfaction of one’s curiosity
- What do you enjoy doing most? Writing on a blackboard
- What is your biggest pet peeve? Calling customer services
- What talent would you like to have? Dancing
- What do you most value in a colleague? Sincerity
- What is your motto? A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
- People would be surprised to know… my favorite animal is the shoebill
- Are you a morning person or night owl? night owl
- If you were stuck on a desert island, what three things would you need to have with you? water filter, cast net, starlink
About Professor Dai 
Zhehao Dai is a condensed matter theorist. Zhehao obtained a Ph.D. in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at MIT in (2020). The topic of Zhehao’s thesis was on the intriguing physics of gapless states in strongly correlated condensed matter systems. This is a topic of timely relevance within the context of novel phases in “pseudogap metals’’ and high temperature superconductors. Zhehao went on to a Postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley (2020-2024) where he helped develop some very sophisticated mathematical and numerical novel methods to study tensor network states in low dimensional physics.