Charles M. Marcus is a professor at the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI), University of Copenhagen. Charles Marcus was raised in Sonoma, California, USA, and was an undergraduate at Stanford University (1980-84). He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard in 1990 and was an IBM postdoctoral fellow at Harvard from 1990-92. He then served on the Physics faculty at Stanford (1992-2000) and Harvard (2000-2011) where he also was Director of the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems (2006-2011). Marcus joined the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI), University of Copenhagen, in Denmark in 2012 as Villum Kann Rasmussen Professor, sponsored by the Villum Foundation, serving as Director of the Center for Quantum Devices, a Center of Excellence of the Danish National Research Foundation. From 2016-21 he was Scientific Director of Microsoft Quantum Lab–Copenhagen. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and foreign member of the Danish Royal Academy of Science and Letters. In 1999 he was awarded the Industry Prize by the Danish Academy of Natural Sciences, and in 2020 was the first non-Dane to receive the H.C. Ørsted Gold Medal by the Society for the Dissemination of Natural Science.
Marcus’s research interests focus on quantum mechanically coherent electronics, quantum bits, quantum chaos, and topology in condensed matter systems. The long-term research goal is to build and explore large-scale interconnected quantum coherent and topological systems with with an eye toward applications in quantum information.