Keshav Dani

Keshav Dani is an experimental physicist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan. Born and brought up in Pune, India, Keshav moved to the US for his bachelor’s degree at Caltech. Following a short stint in Quantum Information Science, he studied the ultrafast and nonlinear response of optically excited materials for his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, and as a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2011, he joined OIST as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Leveraging the unique academic environment there, he developed a new class of instrumentation in multi-dimensional photoemission spectroscopy. With this, he seeks to image, in real- and momentum-space, how matter can transform – without being destroyed – when exposed to intense light, on extremely short timescales. His recent work includes the imaging of dark excitons in two-dimensional semiconductors, and of defects in perovskite photovoltaic materials. 

Keshav Dani was a Falling Walls Winner in the Physical Sciences category in 2023.