Mikhail Lukin received his Ph.D. degree from Texas A&M University in 1998. He has been on the faculty of the Harvard Physics Department since 2001, where he is currently the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, as well as a co-Director of the Harvard Quantum Initiative in Science and Engineering and a co-Director of the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms.

His research includes quantum manipulation of atomic and nanoscale solid-state systems, quantum many-body physics and applications to quantum metrology and quantum information processing, including realization of quantum computers and quantum networks, and development of nanoscale quantum sensors. He is a fellow of the OSA, APS, and AAAS and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a co-founder and Board member of two Boston-area startups: Quantum Diamond Technologies, Inc. and QuEra Computing, Inc.