When Nathanan Tantivasadakarn left Thailand to start college in the U.S., he knew he wanted to study physics. Now, in just his second year on the faculty at Stony Brook University, he has been named one of only 20 scientists and engineers in the country to receive a 2026 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

Tantivasadakarn, an assistant professor with the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Department of Physics and Astronomy, was selected by the David & Lucile Packard Foundation for his work in condensed-matter theory and quantum information. The fellowship comes with $985,834 spread over five years, and recipients are free to use the money however it best advances their research.

“This was a really prestigious fellowship, so of course I was very glad to be selected,” Tantivasadakarn said. “It’ll give me the opportunity to be ambitious in my research, especially since I just started as an assistant professor here.”

Each year the foundation chooses 20 fellows from 50 invited institutions. Past recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physics and to be elected to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Tantivasadakarn already spoke English when he arrived in the U.S., which helped, though adjusting to a new culture took time. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics, mathematics and astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley, a master’s in physics from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and a doctorate from Harvard University.

He then spent about three years as a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, where he was also a visiting researcher at Microsoft, before joining SBU in the fall of 2025.