Scientist. Engineer. Designer. Founder.
Hi, I’m Nick.
My career has been focused on understanding computers—how they work (down to the atomic scale) and where they are headed. During my time at MIT as a PhD student and post-doctoral fellow, I explored what may become the ultimate tool for understanding the exquisite details of our universe: quantum computers. Quantum computing is profoundly exciting, but supporting hardware technologies are not ready yet. I've developed a level of expertise in designing components and systems that create, process, and detect light and what I've been able to build leads me to believe that the next step in the evolution of computing is all about light. I founded Lightmatter with a mission of creating photonic computers and new ways for chips to communicate. We are building machines that will serve as a new engine for human progress.
I grew up in the Redwood Forest.
Gasquet, CA
Science, art, and design are in my blood.
Lee Merritt Blodget
San Francisco Art Institute (formerly CSFA)
1919-1995
Rene Prestwood
UC Berkeley
Bobby Vilas
Photographer, Designer
Great grandfather. Photographer and understudy to Ansel Adams in Yosemite. Navy pilot in aerial reconnaissance during World War II. Survived kamikaze attack. Recipient of Wings of Gold, a Distinguished Flying Cross, three Air Medals, and a Special Presidential Letter of Commendation. Blodget and his wife Betty were models for some of Adams’s Kodak Panorama photographs. Pier 24 exhibition in San Francisco. Find his work at MoMA.
Great grandpibling. Prestwood was recruited for the Manhattan Project as a young chemist from the University of California-Berkeley. He worked on the neutron source for the Fat Man implosion bomb. After the war, he completed his PhD in nuclear chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. He worked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory for most of his career. More info.
Uncle. Photographer, industrial designer, and generally a rad dude. Bobby travels the world, renovates homes, cars, motorcycles and anything else and documents his travels. Check out his work.
To make fundamental progress in computing, it may be necessary to explore many fronts simultaneously—at least that’s the approach I’ve taken…
Quantum Information
Explorations into the creation of scalable sources of entangled single-photon states, unitary quantum state evolution networks, scalable superconducting single-photon detection and leveraging these components to demonstrate results in quantum simulation, supremacy validation and computing…and a sprinkle of quantum cryptography.
Silicon Photonics
My platform of choice for developing computing hardware. I helped develop the OpSIS MPW service at UW—designing PDK components and writing large-scale wafer-test programs. This was an ultra-fast learning avenue that enabled me to create new systems based on modulators, detectors, waveguides, resonators, computational multi-port devices and more.
Machine Learning
A focus on answering questions around machine learning with physical machines in both the classical and quantum regimes. Algorithms and novel compute architectures.
