Charles M. Marcus

Charles Marcus was raised in Sonoma, California, and was an undergraduate at Stanford University (1980-84). He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard in 1990. He served on the Physics faculty at Stanford (1992-2000) and Harvard (2000-2011) where he was Director of the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems (2006-2011). Marcus joined the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI), University of Copenhagen,  in 2012 as Villum Kann Rasmussen Professor, serving as Director of the Center for Quantum Devices. From 2016-21 he was also Scientific Director of Microsoft Quantum Lab–Copenhagen.

In April 2023, Marcus joined the University of Washington faculty in Materials Science and Engineering in the College of Engineering, and in Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, as the Boeing Johnson Endowed Chair. His laboratory is in the NanoES building, and he teaches in Materials Science and Engineering and in Physics.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and foreign member of the Danish Royal Academy of Science and Letters. He was awarded the Danish Industry Prize and was the first non-Dane to receive the H.C. Ørsted Gold Medal, awarded only 20 times since 1909, including to Niels Bohr in 1924.

Marcus’s research interests focus on experimental condensed matter physics, quantum coherent electronics, quantum matter, qubits, quantum chaos, complexity, and topology in condensed matter. A long-term research goal is to explore large-scale interconnected quantum coherent and topological systems for fundamental understanding of complex quantum materials and applications in quantum information.