Introducing the Inaugural Speaker – Monika Schleier-Smith on March 9th, 2020
The Frederica Darema Lectures Series is proud to announce that Monika Schleier-Smith, an experimental atomic physics professor at Stanford University and Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar in the School of Humanities and Sciences, will be the inaugural speaker this winter!
Dr. Schleier-Smith has a reputation for embracing the uphill climb. She’ll push, push, push the smallest details of an experiment until she achieves what others thought near impossible. “She tends to persist,” says Harvard physicist Susanne Yelin, who follows Schleier-Smith’s research. Which is certainly an inspiration to those who seek to follow in her footsteps.
She has spoken at countless international stages from Germany to India as well as given a talk not too long ago at Davis on Quantum Information and Quantum Gravity V! She has also been been, both the chair of the organizing committee and a speaker, at MITs Rising Stars in Physics Workshop, a two-day career workshop for women postdocs and graduate students. She has also been an invited speaker at the APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP), giving a research talk targeted to undergraduates. About half of the current lab members in Dr. Schleier-Smith research lab at Stanford are female, atypical in such a male-dominated field.
Schleier-Smith traces her interest in physics back to high school, when a chemistry teacher told her to think of an electron as “spread out like peanut butter.” The idea fascinated her. She sensed that a deeper understanding meant studying quantum mechanics.
As a graduate student at MIT, Schleier-Smith worked with a small team that pushed the precision of an atomic clock beyond what’s known as the “standard quantum limit,” a result reported in 2010. Though people knew this was theoretically possible, many thought it was too hard to try to pull off. Schleier-Smith spent weeks optimizing and troubleshooting the control circuitry that kept the experiment’s lasers at the right frequency, says Ian Leroux, who was on the MIT team and is now at Canada’s National Research Council Metrology Research Centre in Ottawa. She has “that blend of care, dexterity, observation and attention to detail that lets her make an apparatus work better than it has any right to.”
Currently her research lab focuses on quantum engineering with cold atoms. Her research group has an experimental toolbox which includes non-local interactions mediated by light in an optical cavity, and they are expanding it to include long-range interactions among Rydberg atoms. They are particularly interested in developing methods of optimal quantum control to exploit such interactions to maximal advantage.