Charlie Marcus is Professor of Physics at Harvard.  He was an undergraduate at Stanford, earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, and continued there as an IBM postdoc.  In 1992 he joined the physics faculty at Stanford University, but returned to Harvard in 2000 to assume his current appointment.  From 2004-2009, he was Director of Harvard’s Center for Nanoscale Systems.

Charlie’s research focuses on fabrication of submicron electronic structures – semiconductor quantum dots, carbon nanotubes, and graphene-based microstructures – and measurement of their electron transport properties at low temperatures. His scientific interests include mesoscopic quantum phenomena, at the interface between micro and macro scales – where quantum properties coexist with disorder and decoherence. Charlie’s current research includes investigations of spin-based qubits for quantum information processing, and schemes for topological quantum computing based on the fractional quantum Hall effect. He is also exploring the use of quantum dots in medical imaging, focusing primarily on novel materials as contrast agents for magnetic resonance