JILA Fellow Cindy Regal Wins 2020 FRED Award

Cindy Regal in her lab.
JILA Fellow Cindy Regal has been selected as the 2020 recipient of The $250,000 FRED Award recognizes and rewards innovative research that could transform an area of science.
is a distinguished scientist whose pioneering work has been highly cited and recognized by the physics community. She won the RCSA鈥檚 Cottrell Scholar Award in 2014, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2012, and a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering in 2011. She was also named an American Physical Society Fellow in 2017.
Her work has focused on using mechanical vibrations in solids to explore quantum information and quantum optics. Regal鈥檚 research has also contributed to the development of atomic quantum bits, and devised ways to cool and detect motion of tangible objects at their quantum ground state.
鈥淭his is high-impact work that could accelerate basic science,鈥 said RCSA Senior Program Director Silvia Ronco. 鈥淎s a dedicated teacher and outstanding scientist, Cindy represents the best of our Cottrell Scholar community.鈥
Regal鈥檚 FRED Award project will investigate mechanical films suspended with an engineered lattice of tethers.
"We are going to study and harness some mechanical objects that look rather like a spider web or a snowflake, depending on your angle. And if we are successful in this approach, these suspensions will be sensitive enough to, for example, detect and image nuclear spins by picking up on miniscule forces,鈥 Regal said. 鈥淲e are very excited to pursue the science the Research Corporation will enable through this project.鈥