Leslie Schoop

Schoop grew up in Germany close to the border with Belgium. She has said that her mother was a strong independent woman.^[2] She was an undergraduate student at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universitaet in Mainz.^[3] She completed her doctoral research at Princeton University, where she worked on exotic properties in condensed matter with Robert Cava.^[4][5] She was unsure whether to pursue a career in academia or industry, and turned to her grandfather for her advice, who said, "You know, Leslie, money should never be a reason why you make a career decision. If you're good at your job, the money will come".^[2]

After her PhD, Schoop remained at Princeton for a postdoctoral position, during which she worked on superconductivity.^[3] She was awarded a Minerva program fellowship and moved to the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research to work alongside Bettina Lotsch,^[6] where she found the first non-toxic air-stable topological semi-metal, ZrSiS.^[7]

In 2017, Schoop established her own research group at Princeton, where she identified new topological semimetals and predicted their crystal properties.^[3] She was supported by the Beckman Foundation to investigate new magnetic topological materials low-power computation.^[8]

In 2022, she identified a new quantum state in twisted bilayer tungsten ditelluride.^[9] In confined electrons, twisted bilayer graphene are strongly correlated, forming one-dimensional linear arrays of conductive channels.^[9] The observation of Luttinger liquids in two-dimensional materials was expected to be very challenging to achieve experimentally, but Schoop and co-workers observed it in a Moiré super lattice.^[9]

• 2015 Minerva Fast Track Fellowship, Max Planck Society^[6]
• 2019 EPiQS Materials Synthesis Investigator – Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation^[10]
• 2019 Beckman Young Investigator Award^[8]
• 2020 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering^[2]
• 2021 Office for Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award^[11]
• 2021 Sloan Fellowship^[12]
• 2022 National Science Foundation CAREER Award^[13]

• Large, non-saturating magnetoresistance in WTe2^[14]
• Dirac cone protected by non-symmorphic symmetry and three-dimensional Dirac line node in ZrSiS^[7]
• A new form of Ca3P2 with a ring of Dirac nodes^[15]