In a career that has stretched five decades (and counting), theoretical physicist Steven Girvin has gone from being a “late-blooming” young academic to one of the world’s foremost authorities on quantum computing.
It’s a journey the Yale physics community celebrated earlier this year at a two-day “Girvin Fest” honoring Yale’s Sterling Professor of Physics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, professor of applied physics at Yale Engineering, and member of the Yale Quantum Institute.
On the second day of the symposium, which also commemorated Girvin’s 75th birthday, he took a moment to offer a heartfelt thank you to people who made his career possible — his wife, his parents, his mentors, and his collaborators. And he didn’t forget the man at the hobby shop who sold him his first crystal radio kit.
An audio clip of Girvin’s remarks can be found below.
A physicist looks back
A physicist looks back
Girvin was born in Texas, moved to Florida when he was eight, and went to high school in Brant Lake, New York, a hamlet in the town of Horicon in the Adirondacks. He was the sort of kid who would rig up antennas on tall trees so he could pull in more signals for his beloved ham radio.
He attended Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine, on a scholarship, did his Ph.D. work at Princeton, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University and Chalmers Institute of Technology in Sweden.
After stints at Indiana and the National Bureau of Standards, Girvin joined the Yale faculty in 2001. Over the next 20-plus years, he helped pioneer the field of circuit quantum electrodynamics — one of the leading approaches to quantum information systems — along with colleagues including Yale physicist Robert Schoelkopf and Michel Devoret, the F.W. Beinecke Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics and Physics at Yale and winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize.
“How I got to where I am today is dominated by many, many people who stepped in and did great things for me,” Girvin said.
