Paola Cappellaro

Paola Cappellaro is the Ford Professor of Engineering and a professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Department of Physics. She leads the Quantum Engineering Group in MIT’s Research Lab for Electronics (RLE). Her research is to design and control quantum devices for quantum simulations, computation, and quantum sensing. She combines theoretical insight into the dynamics of spin qubit systems and expertise in their experimental control to tackle outstanding challenges in developing robust and scalable quantum devices. With collaborators, she pioneered quantum magnetic sensing using electronic spin defects in diamond (the Nitrogen-Vacancy center). She earned a PhD from MIT, and was a postdoc at Harvard University’s Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics.

Selected Publications

• Wang, G., Xu, W., Li, C., Vuletić, V., & Cappellaro, P. (2025). Individual-atom control in an array through phase modulation. Physical Review Applied, 23(2), 024072.
• Sone, A., Touil, A., Maeda, K., Cappellaro, P., & Deffner, S. (2025). No-go theorem for environment-assisted invariance in non-unitary dynamics. New Journal of Physics, 27, 064509.
• Xu, H., Tang, H., Wang, G., Li, C., Li, B., Cappellaro, P., & Li, J. (2023). Solid-state 229Th nuclear laser with two-photon pumping. Physical Review A, 108(2), L021502.

Media

• November 10, 2025: MIT News, Leading quantum at an inflection point
• April 3, 2024: MIT News, MIT researchers discover “neutronic molecules”
• February 8, 2024: MIT News, Technique could improve the sensitivity of quantum sensing devices