Chetan Nayak

Biography

Chetan Nayak is the General Manager of Quantum Hardware at Microsoft. He is also a professor of physics at UCSB. He was born and raised in New York City, where he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1988. He received his B.A. from Harvard in 1992 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1996. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB from 1996-97. He was a Professor of Physics at UCLA from 1997 through 2006 and at UCSB from 2007 through the present. He was a visiting Professor at Nihon University in Japan in 2002.

His work has focused on condensed matter physics, particularly topological phases of matter and their application to fault-tolerant quantum computation, as well as periodically-driven quantum systems, high-temperature superconductivity, ‘strange metals,’ and disordered systems. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was the recipient of an A.P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Career Award, and the American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association Outstanding Young Physicist Award.