Rate My Professor Michael Flatté

Michael Flatté is the F. Wendell Miller Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Iowa. He earned an A.B. in Physics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1992, advised by Nobel Laureate Walter Kohn. Following postdoctoral research at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara and a fellowship at Harvard University’s Division of Applied Sciences, Flatté joined the University of Iowa faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1995. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2000 and to Professor in 2005. From 2010 to 2017, he directed the Optical Science and Technology Center. Additionally, he holds a part-time professorship in Photonics and Semiconductor Nanophysics at Eindhoven University of Technology since 2010.

Flatté’s research specializes in condensed matter and materials theory, with a focus on carrier and spin dynamics in semiconductors. His work encompasses semiconductor spintronics, solid-state quantum computation, quantum coherent dynamics of spins in solid-state materials, spin-photon coupling and entanglement, spin transport, quantum sensing, and quantum information processing. The Michael E. Flatté Research Group employs theoretical techniques such as ab initio methods, nonequilibrium Green's functions, and drift-diffusion equations to explore nanoscale matter. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Key publications include “Challenges for semiconductor spintronics” (Nature Physics, 2007), “Single dopants in semiconductors” (Nature Materials, 2011), “Strong field interactions between a nanomagnet and a photonic cavity” (Physical Review Letters, 2010), and “Atom-by-atom substitution of Mn in GaAs and visualization of their hole-mediated interactions” (Nature, 2006). Flatté has authored over 135 publications, 12 review articles or book chapters, holds four patents, and edited one book. Recent achievements include a $482,000 award from Argonne National Laboratory’s Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center in 2026 for quantum transduction research and contributions to novel quantum computer designs using magnets to entangle qubits.