Dr. Serena Eley is an Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. Prior to this, she served as an Assistant Professor of Physics at the Colorado School of Mines. She earned her B.S. in physics at Caltech then conducted research at the International Superconductivity Technology Center in Tokyo, Japan as a Henry Luce Scholar before earning her Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation work, for which she received the John Bardeen Award, explored proximity effects and vortex dynamics in nanostructured superconductor—normal-metal arrays, revealing behavior that deviates from conventional proximity effect theories. After graduate school, she worked at Sandia National Laboratories on designing Si-based devices composed of quantum dot nanostructures and shallow donors for spin quantum bits and, as a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, on vortex dynamics in superconductors. Currently, Professor Eley’s research group studies superconducting and magnetic materials/devices.  Eley won a National Science Foundation Career award to design superconductor-ferromagnet heterostructures that host skyrmion-vortex pairs, a Cottrell Scholars Award to study energy loss in superconducting microwave resonators, and the American Institute of Physics NSBP Joseph A. Johnson Award. Outside of physics, Serena is an accomplished long distance runner, having placed 3rd female in the Grindstone 100 miler (2023) and Bighorn 100 miler (2015), 2nd female in the Angeles Crest 100 miler (2017), 6th female in the Budapest Marathon (2016), 1st overall in the Angel Fire 50-miler (2017), 1st female in the Old Goats 50-miler (2014), and 1st female in three Dances-with-Dirt 50K races (2010-2011). Running Slideshow