Scientia Professor Michelle Simmons
2017- Director, Silicon Quantum Computing Pty Ltd.,
2010- Director, Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology
2014 Editor-in-Chief, Nature Partner Journal Quantum Information
2013 Laureate Fellowship, Australian Research Council
2009- Scientia Professorship, University of New South Wales
Professor Simmons is the Founder and CEO of Silicon Quantum Computing and the Director of the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology. As an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, she has pioneered unique technologies internationally to build electronic devices in silicon at the atomic scale, including the world's smallest transistor, the narrowest conducting wires, 3D atomic electronics and the first two qubit gate using atom-based qubits in silicon. Her team is at the forefront of the global race to develop a quantum computer in silicon. Michelle is one of a handful of researchers in Australia to have twice received an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship and now a Laureate Fellowship. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Association of the Advancement of Science, the UK Institute of Physics, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering and the Australian Academy of Science.
In 2018 Professor Simmons was named Australian of the Year, one of the nation’s pre-eminent awards.
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2018 Australian of the Year
2017 George R. Stibitz Computing Pioneer Award, The American Computer Museum
2017 Asia Pacific L’ORÉAL-UNESCO Laureate in the Physical Sciences
2016 US Foresight Institute Feynman Prize in Experimental Nanotechnology
2015 CSIRO Eureka Prize for Leadership in Science
2015 Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal, Australian Academy of Science
2013 Walter Burfitt Prize, Royal Society of New South Wales
2012 New South Wales Scientist of the Year Government
2005 Pawsey Medal, Australian Academy of Science
The atomic electronics research led by Professor Michelle Y. Simmons has the ultimate goal of developing a scalable, phosphorus in silicon, quantum processor. Professor Simmons’s group leads the field internationally in making precision atomic electronic devices in silicon for both conventional and quantum computing. Using a combination of scanning tunneling microscopy and molecular beam epitaxy phosphorus dopant atoms are controllably placed in Si devices with atomic precision. This has led to the development of the narrowest conducting wires in silicon, the development of the smallest precision transistors, the first two qubit gate between atom qubits in silicon and more complex architectures towards error correction. This ambitious program is currently developing all the functional elements for an error corrected scalable spin-based quantum computer, including techniques for multiplexed parallel qubit addressability, 3D atomic precision patterning, fast gate-based read-out, and both error detection and correction.