Andrea Urru

Andrea Urru is an Italian theoretical condensed matter physicist who left a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University to become a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, Italy, his alma mater.

Urru earned his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Cagliari in 2014 and his master's degree in physics from the same university in 2016, both with the highest honors (110/110 cum laude), under the supervision of Prof. Vincenzo Fiorentini. He then completed his PhD magna cum laude in theory and numerical simulation of condensed matter at SISSA in Trieste in 2020, advised by Prof. Andrea Dal Corso. He held a postdoctoral position at ETH Zurich from 2021 to 2023 before joining Rutgers as an Abrahams Postdoctoral Fellow in September 2023, working with Professors David Vanderbilt and Karin Rabe.

Urru had moved to the US in 2023 hoping to eventually secure a permanent faculty position there. But after the National Science Foundation came under threat from federal funding cuts, he said that option "became even fainter, and I decided to direct my efforts towards getting funds in Europe." His research uses symmetry analysis and first-principles computational techniques to study multiferroic materials and magnetoelectric effects, phenomena where electric and magnetic properties in a material are coupled.