Dr Erik Streed

Dr. Erik Streed is an Associate Professor at Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus, noted for being the first person to take a photo of an atom's shadow! He was also the first physicist appointed in the Gold Coast and in 2011 he received the Queensland Young Tall Poppy Science Award from the Premier.

Dr. Streed received his BSc in Physics from the California Institute of Technology, with senior thesis work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His PhD in Physics was attained from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked alongside Prof. W. Ketterle (Nobel 2001) on Bose-Einstein condensate- an ultracold quantum state of matter. Now, he is a member of the Institute for Glycomics as well as the Centre for Quantum Dynamics. His interests include Quantum Thermodynamics, Quantum Information, and adapting techniques from these fields to developing new techniques towards solving problems in chemistry and biology.

Integrating these disciplines in his research, his current bio-efforts focus on combining ion trapping with advanced microscopy to unravel structural questions about the dynamics of biomolecules, while his work in quantum physics focuses on solving the problem of getting light into and out of quantum computers using an approach based on the segmented optics found in lighthouses.