Chetan Nayak, PhD

Chetan Nayak is director of Microsoft Station Q, Microsoft Research’s center for topological quantum computing, and one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists working on topological approaches to fault-tolerant quantum computation. Nayak grew up in New York City and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1988, winning the top prize at the Science Talent Search that year. He earned his B.A. from Harvard University in 1992 and his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1996, where his dissertation on theories of the half-filled Landau level was completed under Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek. That same year, he and Wilczek discovered the non-Abelian statistics associated with Majorana zero modes — a theoretical result that would become the cornerstone of Microsoft’s quantum computing program. After postdoctoral work at UCSB and faculty positions at UCLA and UCSB, he joined Microsoft in 2005 and became director and general manager of Microsoft Station Q in 2014, while retaining his UCSB professorship. In Feb. 2025, his team unveiled the Majorana 1 chip, an eight-qubit topological processor representing a major milestone — though one that has also generated significant scientific debate — in the effort to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computation. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and NSF Early Career Award.