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]