Rate My Professor Michael Manfra

Michael J. Manfra is the Bill and Dee O'Brien Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University, with joint appointments as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Materials Engineering. He earned an A.B. in Physics from Harvard University in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Physics from Boston University in 1999. Manfra joined the Purdue faculty in 2009 as the William F. and Patty J. Miller Associate Professor of Physics and was promoted to full professor in 2013. Prior to Purdue, he served as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories from 2001 to 2008. His research focuses on solid-state quantum computing, molecular beam epitaxy growth of semiconductor nanostructures, and transport properties of low-dimensional correlated electron systems. In 2025, he was appointed Director of the Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute, and in 2026 he became Chief Quantum Officer at Purdue University. He previously held the Bill and Dee O'Brien Chair Professor of Physics and Astronomy title from 2016 to 2020. Manfra received the 2026 APS Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize. His work centers on the quantum-mechanical properties of electrons in ultra-high purity III-V semiconductor and superconductor devices, including studies of topological phases in the fractional quantum Hall regime and development of devices for quantum bits.