Summary: Strong AMO and quantum-sensing presence (Stamper-Kurn ultracold atoms, Budker precision magnetometry legacy ties) plus tight coupling to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab across the street.
Notes: Excellent access to LBNL cleanrooms and beamlines; large, diverse postdoc community.
Warnings: Bay Area housing costs are punishing on a postdoc salary; commute from affordable areas can exceed an hour.
Fletcher combines optical and force microscopy (AFM, optical tweezers) with purified-protein and single-cell assays to measure the mechanics of cell movement and immune-cell activation, and has also developed low-cost imaging instrumentation (foldscopes, phone-based microscopes) for global health.
Garcia combines light-sheet and single-molecule fluorescence imaging with quantitative modeling to measure transcriptional dynamics in living Drosophila embryos in real time, quantifying how individual promoters and enhancers make fast, precise decisions during development. The group is actively recruiting postdocs interested in physical biology and quantitative live imaging.
Ginsberg's group devises new ultrafast electron- and optical-microscopy modalities to watch charge, energy, and structural dynamics in soft and hybrid materials (organic semiconductors, perovskites, biomolecular assemblies) on their native nanometer/femtosecond scales. The lab is actively recruiting postdocs to extend these methods toward operando imaging of energy materials.
Haeffner's group traps and coherently controls individual and few-ion crystals to perform quantum logic spectroscopy, entanglement-enhanced metrology, and quantum simulation, using trapped ions as some of the most precisely controllable quantum sensors available. The lab is actively recruiting postdocs to work on next-generation ion-trap sensing and control techniques.
Holzapfel develops and deploys cryogenic TES bolometer arrays with SQUID multiplexed readout for the South Pole Telescope and related cosmic microwave background experiments, pushing detector sensitivity toward the photon-noise limit for measurements of CMB anisotropy and polarization.
Kante's group explores topological and non-Hermitian (parity-time-symmetric) photonic structures, including magnetless nonreciprocal metasurfaces and topological lasers, to control light-matter interaction in nanophotonic devices in ways not accessible to conventional photonics.
Kolkowitz's group builds ultra-precise strontium optical lattice clocks for differential clock comparisons and fundamental-physics tests, and separately pioneered scanning single-NV magnetometry for imaging nanoscale current and spin transport in quantum materials. This combination of atomic-clock and solid-state defect-spin sensing places the group's diamond work squarely alongside the broader NV ensemble sensing literature (DEER, nanoscale NMR, T1 relaxometry) that has achieved pT/sqrt(Hz)-class field sensitivities; the lab is actively recruiting postdocs in both directions.
Lee designs and builds large-format TES bolometer arrays and their SQUID-multiplexed cryogenic readout electronics for the South Pole Telescope and CMB-S4, working to push per-detector noise toward the fundamental photon-noise limit for next-generation cosmic microwave background polarization surveys.
Leone's group generates attosecond and few-femtosecond XUV/X-ray pulses to track electron dynamics and charge migration in molecules and materials in real time, pushing time-domain spectroscopy toward the natural timescale of electronic motion.
Levine builds neutral-atom tweezer-array and superconducting-qubit platforms for quantum computing, quantum error correction, and quantum sensing, aiming to combine the programmability of Rydberg arrays with new approaches to distributed and networked quantum sensing. The group is actively recruiting postdocs.