Despina A. Louca is an American condensed matter physicist and materials scientist from Cyprus.
Her research involves the use of neutron scattering and X-ray scattering techniques to measure the behavior of materials with exotic electromagnetic and quantum properties including topological insulators, semimetals, antiferromagnets, helimagnets, and superconductors.
[1][3] Her dissertation, Lattice Effects in Magnetoresistive La1−xSrxMnO3 Manganites, was supervised by Takeshi Egami.
[4] She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before joining the University of Virginia as an assistant professor in 1999.
[5] Louca was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2014, after a nomination from the APS Division of Materials, "for demonstration of the importance of the local atomic structure for elucidating the physical properties of complex oxides including the transition metal oxides through neutron scattering using the pair-density-function analysis".