Elizabeth Behrman

Elizabeth Behrman earned a bachelor's from Brown in mathematics, a master's from UIUC in chemistry, and a PhD, also from UIUC, in physics. After a postdoc at Stony Brook her first professorship was at the NYS College of Ceramics in Alfred, NY. In 1990 she moved to Wichita State, and is now full professor of both physics and mathematics there. Since 2023 she has been on loan to the National Science Foundation, where she is a program director with the quantum portfolio for Foundations of Emerging Technologies. She has received numerous awards, including a Lady Davis Fellowship and a Kavli Scholarship. Her research interests and publications are broad, ranging from chemical reaction dynamics to physics of glasses to ceramic superconductors to Feynman path integral methods. Her major research achievements include the discovery of inorganic buckyballs and buckytubes, and, with Jim Steck, the invention of quantum neural networks: Teaching a quantum system to do a desired computation, the application of machine learning methods to quantum computing.