Assistant Professor of Physics
“I learned to walk; since then have I let myself run”
Professor Simone Colombo was born and raised in Switzerland. In 2013 he obtained his Master of Science degree in Physics at the University of Fribourg, and 4 years later, he completed his PhD in Physics from the same university under the supervision of Prof. Antoine Weis. During this period he developed sensitive and robust optically pumped atomic magnetometers for biomedical applications; in particular, he invented and characterized a technique to image magnetic nanoparticles’ spatial distribution using optically pumped atomic magnetometer-based detection.
In 2017, he accepted the Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship from the the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and moved to the US to work with professor Vladan Vuletić at MIT. He worked at MIT for nearly six years as postdoc (2017-2022) and research scientist (2022-2023). There he generated and controlled the first collective entanglement in an optical lattice atomic clock, developed a time-reversal technique that provides unprecedented metrological gain, and witnessed the exponentially fast scrambling of quantum infromation in a many-body atomic system.
In 2023, Prof. Colombo joined the Physics Department at the University of Connecticut as an Assistant Professor.
The Colombo Lab 