Running down a dream
2023 Guggenheim Fellow Prineha Narang goes the distance in and out of the lab.
Jonathan Riggs | June 20, 2023
Some first loves aren’t meant to last — just ask Prineha Narang.
“I always say physics is my second love. Running was my first, and I thought I’d be a professional runner,” she says. “A track coach pulled me aside one day and said, ‘Not everyone has what it takes to turn pro. But I hear you’re really good at this physics thing. Maybe you want to focus on that.’”
Narang was eventually grateful for the prescient advice: today, she holds UCLA’s Howard Reiss Chair in Physical Sciences, exploring quantum systems to better understand the dynamics of nonequilibrium states in nature. Oh, and she won a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship.
“This will allow me to spend the next year making progress on a lot of the more esoteric problems I want to tackle. I’m looking forward to making some risky intellectual bets,” she says. “Plus, I’m excited to meet the other fellows, become a part of that community and see what kind of collaborations we could create.”
That sense of collaboration has inspired Narang ever since she moved the Narang Lab, an interdisciplinary group focused on theoretical and computational science, from Harvard to UCLA. Although her experience on the East Coast was transformative — including serving as a research scholar in condensed matter theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an environmental fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and an assistant professor of computational materials science at Harvard — something beyond the Southern California sun seems to have agreed with her.
“Realizing how tight knit the UCLA community is has renewed my optimism in taking bigger interdisciplinary risks in my science and entering new fields,” she says. “That’s the energy on campus: very intellectually deep and unpretentious, where people just want to collaborate and do amazing science.”
Carrying this mission forward on a global scale, Narang was appointed a 2023 U.S. Science Envoy by the State Department. The first science envoy ever in quantum science and technology, she will be charged with sparking new connections with other countries launching their own such programs. This opportunity to move the global conversation in her field forward, both in this role and in her daily research, keeps Narang grounded. Narang recently finished a productive envoy trip to Japan, Korea and Singapore with a host of new international partnerships being set up as a result.
“Every day, I get to follow my curiosity, work on really hard problems and find something new. That’s a privilege,” she says, and adds with a laugh, “and almost as good as being a professional runner.”
She has certainly kept her childhood dream alive on her own terms — Narang has remained a lifelong Ironman triathlon racer and marathon runner. She’s also begun what she calls “mountain adventures,” which have included recent trips to West Coast icons Mt. Whitney, Mt. Shasta, Mt. Hood and soon Mt. Rainier.
“As a scientist and as an athlete, you have to always be optimistic, even when you encounter disappointment after trying something really hard and it not working out how you planned,” she says. “There are a lot of surprises, both good and bad, and that’s what makes it fun!”
For more of Our Stories at the College, click here.
