Despina Louca

Despina Louca, Professor of Physics, holds the Maxine S. and Jesse W. Beams chair in physics. She is also the president of the Neutron Scattering Society of America. Louca’s research is in materials physics, with an emphasis to understand the interactions of spin, charge and lattice degrees of freedom and of their role in phase transitions observed in strongly correlated electron solids that exhibit properties such as magnetoresistance, superconductivity and multiferroicity. Understanding the macroscopic functionality of these systems can be potentially very useful in industrial applications. Louca probes the atomic and magnetic structures and dynamics using scattering techniques performed at national and international neutron and X-ray facilities.

Louca is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Materials Physics, an A.M. in Physics and an A.B. in Physics and Biology from Bryn Mawr College. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1997, prior to joining the University of Virginia faculty in 1999.