Naomi Ginsberg

Professor of Chemistry 

Naomi Ginsberg is a Professor of Chemistry and Physics at University of California, Berkeley and a Faculty Scientist in the Materials Sciences and Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Imaging Divisions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she has been since 2010. She currently focuses on elucidating electronic and molecular dynamics in a wide variety of soft electronic and biological materials by devising new electron, X-ray, and optical imaging modalities to characterize dynamic processes at the nanoscale, as a function of their heterogeneities and over a wide range of time scales. 

Naomi received a B.A.Sc. degree in Engineering Science from University of Toronto in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 2007, after which she held a Glenn T. Seaborg Postdoctoral Fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her background in chemistry, physics, and engineering has previously led her to observe initiating events of photosynthesis that take place in a millionth billionth of a second and to slow, stop, and store light pulses in some of the coldest atom clouds on Earth. She is the Berkeley lead of STROBE, a multi-university NSF Science and Technology Center devoted to imaging science, a member of the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute at Berkeley, and the recipient of a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2011), a DARPA Young Faculty Award (2012), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2015), and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2016) in addition to a series of teaching awards in the physical sciences and the campus-wide Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award (2022). In 2017-18 she was a Miller Professor for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley and was designated a Kavli Fellow. In 2019 she was the Kroto Lecturer in Chemical Physics at Florida State University. She is the recipient of the 2020 ACS Early-Career Award in Experimental Physical Chemistry and became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2021.