Monika Schleier-Smith

Scientists work to find the answers to questions that may be far beyond our understanding. Monika Schleier-Smith's work in physics has been key in shedding light on the complicated nature of particle quantum systems. A graduate of Harvard University who received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Schieier-Smith earned her place among the 2020 class of MacArthur Foundation fellows thanks in part to her research that focused on studying quantum entanglement within atoms. Her research has led Schleier-Smith and the team working at her Stanford University-based lab to dig deeper into long-term experiments on space-time and simulating what happens to atoms within black holes, among other projects. Schleier-Smith told Quanta Magazine: "We're still at the stage of getting more and more control, characterizing the quantum states that we have. But … I would love to get to that point where we don't know what will happen," she said. "And maybe we measure the correlations in the system, and we learn that there's a geometric description, some holographic description that we didn't know was there. That would be cool."