Michelle Simmons

Michelle Yvonne Simmons is a Scientia Professor of Quantum Physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of New South Wales and has twice been an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and is now an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow. She is the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation & Communication Technologyand is recognised internationally as a pioneer in atomic electronics and Quantum Computing.

In the 1990s Simmons worked as a Research Fellow in Quantum electronics alongside Sir Michael Pepper at the Cavendish Laboratory in the UK where she gained an international reputation for her work in the discovery of the 0.7 feature and the development of 'hole' transistors. In 1999, she was awarded a QEII Fellowship and came to Australia, where she was a founding member of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computer Technology.

Since 2000, Simmons has established a large research group dedicated to the fabrication of Atomic scale devices in silicon and germanium using the atomic precision of scanning tunnelling microscopy. Her research group is the only group worldwide that can create atomically precise devices in silicon—they were also the first team in the world to develop a working "perfect" single-atom transistorand the narrowest conducting doped wires in silicon.

Simmons has published over 350 peer-reviewed journal papers amassing over 6,000 citations, written five book chapters and published a book on Nanotechnology. She has also filed four patentsand delivered over 100 invited and plenary presentations at international conferences.

She was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2006.

In 2005, Simmons was awarded the Australian Academy of Science Pawsey MedalIn 2006, she became one of the youngest researchers to be elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In 2011, Simmons was named NSW Scientist of the Year by the NSW Government Office of the Chief Scientist. In 2014, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She won the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science in 2017.