Shimon Kolkowitz

Shimon Kolkowitz is an experimental atomic physicist and quantum scientist, with his research focusing on precision measurement, quantum sensing, and metrology. He graduated with distinction from Stanford University in 2008 with a B.S. in Physics, and earned his PhD in experimental physics at Harvard working with Prof. Mikhail Lukin in 2015, where his research focused on quantum sensing with defects in diamond. He was subsequently a National Research Council (NRC) postdoctoral fellow at JILA/NIST/CU Boulder from 2015-2017, working with Prof. Jun Ye on metrology and quantum science with optical lattice atomic clocks. From 2018 to 2023 he held a faculty position in the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2023, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Physics and holder of the Herst endowed Chair. He is the recipient of several honors and awards, including the Packard Science and Engineering Fellowship (2019), the Sloan Research Fellowship (2022), the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2022), the Moore Experimental Physics Investigator award (2024), a 2026 Miller Research Professorship, and a 2026 Heising-Simons Faculty Fellowship. He is also the Director of the NSF Challenge Institute for Quantum Computation.