Laurie Elizabeth McNeil (born 1956) is an American condensed matter physicist and materials scientist whose research topics have included optical spectroscopy, the properties of crystals and semiconductors, and the synthesis of carbon nanotubes.
She is Bernard Gray Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[1][5] She went on to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for advanced graduate study in physics, including also summer research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory,[5] earning a second master's degree in 1979 and completing her Ph.D. in 1982.
[1] Her dissertation, The effect of pressure on the resistivity and Hall coefficient of amorphous metallic alloys, was supervised by David Lazarus.
[5] After postdoctoral study with Mildred Dresselhaus[6] at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,[7] supported by IBM, she became an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1984, with an adjunct appointment in the Curriculum in Applied Sciences.