Rate My Professor Michael Reimer

Michael Reimer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, with an affiliation to the Institute for Quantum Computing. He joined the university in 2015. Reimer earned a BSc in Honours Physics from the University of Waterloo in 2000. He worked as an R&D Engineer at JDS Uniphase from 2000 to 2002. He then completed an MSc in Engineering Physics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany in 2004 and a PhD in Physics at the University of Ottawa/National Research Council of Canada in 2010. From 2009 to 2014, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Delft in the quantum optics lab of Professor Val Zwiller, where he contributed to the development of solid-state quantum devices including single photon and entangled photon sources based on shaped nanowire heterostructures, nanowire-based single electron devices, and efficient nanowire avalanche photodiodes. In 2013, he was involved with the startup company Single Quantum in developing highly efficient single-photon detectors based on superconducting nanowires. His research focuses on the development of quantum photonic devices and optical approaches to advance quantum information science and technologies, including semiconductor nanowire quantum light sources, hybrid nanowire quantum state converters, quantum memories, integrated quantum photonic circuits, and highly efficient quantum detectors. His group aims to realize a quantum repeater, perform quantum optics and algorithms on a semiconductor chip, create an efficient interface between stationary and flying quantum bits, and develop a plug-and-play tunable quantum light source.

Reimer was promoted to Associate Professor in 2022 after serving as Assistant Professor from 2015 to 2022. He has received the Ministry of Research and Innovation Early Researcher Award in 2017, the En-Hui Yang Engineering Research Innovation Award from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo in 2024, and earlier scholarships including the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship from 2005 to 2008 and University of Ottawa scholarships. Key publications include “Semiconductor nanowire metamaterial for broadband near-unity absorption” in Scientific Reports in 2022 and “The quest for a perfect single-photon source” in Nature Photonics in 2019. He teaches courses such as ECE 405 Introduction to Quantum Mechanics and ECE 630 Physics and Models of Semiconductor Devices.