Steven Girvin

Early career

From 1977 to 1979, Girvin worked as a postdoctoral researcher at both Indiana University Bloomington and Chalmers University of Technology, under the advising of G. D. Mahan. Girvin then held a physicist position at the National Bureau of Standards from 1979 to 1987, where he received the Department of Commerce Bronze Medal for Superior Federal Service in 1983. He joined the faculty of Indiana University in 1987, where he was named Distinguished Professor in 1992, before moving to Yale in 2001.^[4][6]

Yale University

At Yale, Girvin was initially appointed as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics in 2005. In addition to his research and teaching, he served in senior administrative roles: as Deputy Provost for Science and Technology from 2007 to 2015, and as Deputy Provost for Research from 2015 to 2017, overseeing research and strategic planning in the basic sciences and engineering across the university, as well as entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology transfer. In 2017, he stepped down from his administrative role to return full-time to teaching and research.^[7][8]

In September 2020, Girvin was appointed as the founding director of the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C²QA) located at Brookhaven National Laboratory, one of five national quantum information science research centers funded by the Department of Energy. C²QA comprises principal investigators across 24 institutions working on basic research to advance the performance of quantum computer modules. He served in this role until 2021.^[9][7]

In June 2024, Girvin, who was then Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics,^[10] became Sterling Professor of Physics, the highest academic honor bestowed upon a Yale faculty member.^[11] He holds appointments both as a professor of physics and as a professor of applied physics in the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science.^[12]

Girvin has also served on advisory boards for quantum-focused research centers at the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, the California Institute of Technology, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA). He was a founding member of scientific advisory boards for the Simons Foundation and served on the program committee for the Nobel Symposium on Emerging Quantum Technologies from 2018 to 2022.^[7]

Circuit QED

He works with experimentalists Robert Schoelkopf and Michel Devoret on the engineering problem of building a quantum computer,^[3] and on developing "circuit QED" using superconducting electrical circuits.^[14] The group experimentally implemented the first all-electronic quantum processor and executed two-qubit quantum algorithms in 2009.^[15][16] Devoret later received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2025 for his earlier work on macroscopic quantum tunneling in superconducting circuits.^[17]

Quantum error correction

In 2023, the Yale group, including Girvin, demonstrated real-time quantum error correction beyond the break-even point for the first time, using a bosonic code in a superconducting cavity. This result, published in Nature, showed that an error-corrected logical qubit could outperform its best physical component, a key milestone for the field of quantum computing.^[18]

Girvin and collaborators also proposed and demonstrated a dual-rail cavity qubit architecture, in which quantum information is encoded in the single-photon subspace of two superconducting microwave cavities. This approach allows dominant photon loss errors to be detected and converted into erasure errors, which are easier to correct. The proposal was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023,^[19] and the experimental demonstration of erasure-detected logical measurements was published in Nature Physics in 2024.^[20]