Faculty Spotlight
Michael R. Wasielewski, the Clare Hamilton Hall Professor of Chemistry, has been at Northwestern since 1994. He is also Director of the Center for Molecular Quantum Transduction (CMQT), a US-DOE Energy Frontier Research Center, and Director of the Institute for Quantum Information Research and Engineering (INQUIRE). He is member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
What inspired you to pursue a career in chemistry?
As a child, I was fascinated by rockets and the space program, so I was naturally interested in the processes that propelled them. This interest quickly translated into a fascination with chemistry in general. Having a home lab in my parents’ basement certainly helped!
Can you share what brought you to Northwestern in your career journey?
Following my postdoc at Columbia University, I was offered a position at Argonne National Laboratory. At the time, the Lab was a very attractive place because Argonne had a world-class group of scientists working on the molecular basis of photochemical energy transduction by photosynthetic organisms. In addition, some of most well-recognized scientists in the fields of electron transfer and photochemistry were at Argonne. During my early career at Argonne, several career opportunities arose to move my research to a university setting, but none of these approaches enticed me away until I was offered a joint appointment in the Chemistry Department at Northwestern in 1994. I transitioned to a full- time appointment in 1999. Many of the faculty here had research interests that both paralleled and complemented my own, which led to many fruitful collaborations. Perhaps the most attractive and important feature of the scientific culture at Northwestern was and still is the highly collaborative and collegial nature of the chemistry faculty.
You work extensively in Quantum Information Science. How would you describe this research to someone outside the field of chemistry?
Quantum Information Science (QIS) exploits the intrinsic quantum nature of matter and photons to develop new approaches to computing, communications and sensing. Our work focuses specifically on how the quantum properties of molecules can be employed in this context. The two basic quantum properties that are essential to implementing QIS applications are superposition and entanglement of quantum states, which lie at the foundational heart of quantum mechanics. For example, unlike classical computers that rely on bits with only two values, 0 and 1, the quantum bits (qubits) of a quantum computer take advantage of coherent superpositions of 0 and 1, making it possible to greatly increase computational speed. Likewise, if we consider quantum communications, if two sites each possess one photon of an entangled photon pair, information can be transmitted between the two sites by having a third photon interact with one photon of the entangled pair, which is known as quantum teleportation. In the field of sensing, an electron spin that is in a superposition state is very sensitive to its surrounding environment. Even the interaction of an electron spin in a superposition state with a single molecule will elicit a quantum measurement that results in sensing of that molecule.
Can you describe the potential impact of this research?
Quantum computing, communications and sensing have the potential to change everything that impacts our lives from information technology to medicine. Specific examples include computing the properties of large molecules like proteins that would take the best computers today thousands of years to complete, secure communications between quantum devices, and single molecule sensors for medical diagnostics.
What's something interesting about you that's not on your CV?
In addition to bike riding and hiking in the mountains, my two main hobbies are amateur astronomy and model railroading. These are interests that have persisted from my childhood. If I didn’t pursue chemistry as a career, I would have probably chosen to be an astronomer.