Monday, September 22, 2025 – 5:30 PM
Biography
Michael Manfra is the Bill and Dee O’Brien Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Professor of Materials Engineering, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. He serves as Scientific Director of Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette. Mike received his A.B. from Harvard in 1992 and PhD from Boston University in 1999. Mike spent 2 years from 1998 to 2000 as a Postdoctoral Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies and in 2001 he was promoted to Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories where he conducted research in low-dimensional semiconductor systems. After 10 years at Bell Labs, Manfra joined Purdue in 2009. Mike was a Keck Foundation awardee in 2013, was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015, and in 2016 became the Scientific Director of Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette.
Manfra and his team of approximately twenty researchers develop novel qubits and use nanoscale electronic devices to explore the interplay of topology and strong electronic correlations. In 2020, his group reported interferometric measurement of anyon braiding, giving experimental evidence for a theoretical prediction made 40 years earlier.