David Schuster

David Schuster is an experimental physicist whose work develops superconducting circuits and qubit hardware for quantum computation. After earning a mathematics-physics degree at Brown University in 2001 and a physics doctorate at Yale University in 2007, he published 2007 papers on counting individual microwave photons in Nature and on the transmon circuit in Physical Review A. Following postdoctoral work on hybrid quantum systems at Yale and MIT, he joined the University of Chicago physics faculty in 2010, where he received the 2011 McMillan and DARPA Young Faculty awards, a 2012 Sloan Research Fellowship and an NSF CAREER Award. At Chicago in 2016, his team integrated electrons trapped above liquid helium with superconducting quantum circuits, and he moved to Stanford University's Applied Physics department in fall 2022. As of October 2026, he is the Joan Reinhart Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford and a senior author with Jonathan Simon of a January 2026 Nature paper on a cavity-array microscope for single-atom interfacing.

Now at: Stanford University
Works: 335
Citations: 28,856
h-index: 65

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

2001–2007

Brown and Yale degrees

He earns a bachelor's degree in mathematics-physics at Brown University in 2001 and a PhD in physics from Yale University in 2007.
2007

Microwave photons and the transmon

As a Yale graduate student in January 2007, he is lead author of a Nature report on an electronic circuit that stores and measures individual microwave photons, describing single microwave photons as carriers of quantum information between distant qubits. In 2007, Schuster and his colleagues also publish a Physical Review A paper introducing the transmon, a superconducting quantum circuit.
2007–2010

Yale and MIT postdocs

He conducts postdoctoral research at Yale and MIT on hybrid quantum systems before joining the physics department faculty at the University of Chicago in late 2010, where he sets up a lab for quantum technologies.
2011

McMillan and DARPA awards

As an assistant professor in physics at the University of Chicago, he receives the 2011 William L. McMillan Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for circuit quantum electrodynamics experiments, along with the DARPA Young Faculty Award.
2012

Sloan fellowship and CAREER Award

In 2012, he receives a $50,000 Sloan Research Fellowship and a $600,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his project on developing hybrid quantum systems with superconducting circuits.
2016

Electrons as quantum bits

In 2016, Schuster and his University of Chicago collaborators trap electrons above the surface of liquid helium at low temperatures and integrate them with superconducting quantum circuits, aiming to hold a single electron as a quantum bit.
2022–2023

Joining Stanford Applied Physics

He joins the Applied Physics department at Stanford University in fall 2022 and arrives on campus in January 2023. His research focuses on experimental quantum computation, sensing and communications with superconducting circuits, including circuit quantum electrodynamics and the transmon qubit.
As of October 2026

Joan Reinhart Professor at Stanford

As of October 2026, he is the Joan Reinhart Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University. In January 2026, he and Jonathan Simon are senior authors of Nature's “A cavity-array microscope for parallel single-atom interfacing,” an experimental platform coupling individual atoms to individual cavities across more than 40 modes.