Michel Devoret (SEAS)

Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Applied Physics 

Michel Devoret, M.Sc. École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Ph.D. University of Paris, faculty member at Yale since 2002: You are an experimental solid-state physicist whose foundational research has helped launch a revolution in quantum mechanics, an innovative technology which applies the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that are too complex for classical computers. 

When you were young, you came to Yale from France for a year with your father, a doctor who was spending a year at the School of Medicine, and, happily for us, you liked it. Later, through a series of fortuitous events in which you came together with your colleagues and collaborators Rob Schoelkopf and Steve Girvin at Yale, you have collaborated to build the scientific infrastructure for a new generation of technology. 

Your pioneering work stands at the forefront of a transformation so dramatic that, when supercharged by AI, as is likely, it will make computing millions of times faster than the fastest microchip computers today. As a major force in the development of quantum for over forty years, you are a trailblazer of a technology so consequential and far-reaching that it may affect the life of every member of the planet by driving new discoveries in health care, energy, environmental systems, smart materials, and in other ways as yet unimaginable. 

As a true Yalie, you have not restricted your impressive scientific work to technology alone but have blended it with humanistic thought. With Francesco Casetti, Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film & Media Studies, you taught a course “Cinema and Physics: When the Birth of Cinema and the Scientific Revolution Met,” which took up the parallelism between the evolution of art, science, and technology at the turn of the twentieth century, and asked questions such as “Can the humanistic and scientific forms of thinking converge and merge? Can they help each other to become more aware of themselves? And finally, can the rigorous exploration of the world, the language of poets, the pleasure of the performance, the magic of discoveries, productively work together?” 

All of these are perfect questions to be raised at an institution where the prominence of the arts affects so much – and you and Francesco saw the opportunity to ask and explore major intellectual questions that might benefit from being considered together. In testimony to your accomplishment, you have been heralded internationally, and have won, alone or with others, a multitude of prestigious prizes: You were awarded the 1996 Descartes-Huygens Prize of France’s Académie des Sciences and the Royal Academy of Science of the Netherlands; you shared the 1991 Ampere Prize of the French Academy of Science and the 2004 Europhysics-Agilent Prize of the European Physical Society; you shared the 2014 Fritz London Memorial Prize with your Yale collaborator Robert Schoelkopf and your former postdoc John Martinis; and most recently you received the 2022 Micius Quantum Prize with John Clarke, your former adviser at Berkeley, and Yasunobu Nakamura of the University of Tokyo, and the 2024 National Academy of Sciences’ Comstock Prize in Physics with Robert Schoelkopf. 

You have said, “You do the best work that you can. The results of that work have to be true, novel, and meaningful.” Your work has been all of that, Michel Devoret, and as you retire your colleagues hope that you will not forget Yale as you continue making pathbreaking advances on your scientific journey.