Rate My Professor Igor Pikovski

Igor Pikovski serves as the Geoffrey S. Inman '51 Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics within the Charles V. Schaefer, Jr. School of Engineering and Science at Stevens Institute of Technology. A theoretical quantum physicist, he specializes in the intersection of quantum mechanics and gravity. Pikovski obtained his Ph.D. in Quantum Physics from the University of Vienna in 2014, working in the group of Časlav Brukner as part of the Vienna doctoral program on complex quantum systems, affiliated with the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information Vienna. Prior to that, he completed a Diploma in Physics in 2009 at the Free University of Berlin, with an external thesis in the group of Dirk Bouwmeester at UCSB and Leiden University. Following his doctorate, he held an ITAMP Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2014 to 2018 at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, affiliated with Mikhail Lukin's group at Harvard University, where he also received the Branco Weiss Fellowship in 2016. He joined the faculty at Stevens Institute of Technology in November 2018.

Pikovski's research group investigates quantum phenomena, quantum foundations, and quantum information science, with major interests in quantum sensing, macroscopic quantum systems, and the interface of quantum physics and gravity. His work has pioneered approaches to testing quantum gravity using quantum technologies. Notable publications include “Detecting single gravitons with quantum sensing” (Nature Communications, 2024), the journal's most popular physics paper of 2024; “Stimulated absorption of single gravitons: First light on quantum gravity” (arXiv:2407.11929, 2024); “Universal decoherence due to gravitational time dilation” (Nature Physics, 2015); “Probing Planck-scale physics with quantum optics” (Nature Physics, 2012); and “Bell's Theorem for Temporal Order” (Nature Communications, 2019). His honors include the NSF CAREER Award and Stevens Presidential Fellowship in 2023, the Branco Weiss Fellowship (2016-2022), a $1.3 million W.M. Keck Foundation grant in 2026 for building the world's first graviton detector with Yale, an Alfred P. Sloan Partnership grant in 2024 ($776,668 to Stevens), and a Department of Energy grant in 2022.