Meet

Dr. Mark Saffman, Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a preeminent expert in neutral atom quantum computing. He is an experimental physicist working in the areas of atomic physics, quantum and nonlinear optics, and quantum information processing. In 2010 his research team was the first to demonstrate a quantum CNOT gate and entanglement between two trapped neutral atom qubits. Mark received his B.Sc. with honors in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology. Mark worked as a Technical Staff Member at TRW Defense and Space Systems and subsequently as an Optical Engineer at Dantec Electronics Inc. in Denmark before going back to graduate school to earn his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Before joining the faculty in Wisconsin, Mark worked as a Senior Scientist at Riso National Laboratory in Denmark. He also serves as an Associate Editor of Physical Review A, the premier atomic physics journal, and is co-author of a forthcoming book titled Quantum Information Processing: Theory and Implementation. Mark has been recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, the Vilas Associate Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America.