Lydia Sohn received her A.B. degree in chemistry and physics (magna cum laude) from Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges in 1988. She then received her A.M. in physics in 1990 and Ph.D. in physics in 1992 from Harvard University. Following her graduate studies, Sohn held a one-year NSF/NATO postdoctoral appointment in applied physics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. From 1993–95 she was a postdoctoral fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the Semiconductor Physics Research Department, where she developed new methods of lithography with an atomic force microscope. Sohn joined the faculty at Princeton University as an assistant professor of physics in 1995. Since 2003, Sohn has been part of the faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, where she currently is Almy C. Maynard and Agnes Offield Maynard Chair in Mechanical Engineering. Sohn has been the recipient of numerous awards including the National Science Foundation Faculty CAREER award, the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award and the DuPont Young Professor Award.