Randall G. Hulet earned a BS degree at Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Physics at MIT. He was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he worked on laser cooling of trapped atomic ions. He joined the faculty of Rice University in 1987 where he currently holds the Fayez Sarofim Chair in Natural Sciences. His awards include the Davisson-Germer Prize and the I.I. Rabi Prize from the American Physical Society. He is a Fellow of OSA, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the 2017 Herbert Walther Award from OSA.

Hulet’s scientific contributions have been in the area of ultracold atoms, where his group was the first to create quantum gases of the bosonic and fermionic isotopes of lithium. This led to the realization of a Bose-Einstein condensation in an atomic gas with attractive interactions, the study of matter wave solitons, and the observation of antiferromagnetic order in the Hubbard model using spin-1/2 lithium fermions. His work today focuses on emulation of quantum many-body systems with ultracold atoms, and on the properties of matter-wave solitons.