Maurice Skolnick conducts leading-edge research on the physics of semiconductor nanostructures. His work places particular emphasis on understanding quantum dots and photonic structures that allow the manipulation of light, as well as quasiparticles such as polaritons.
He has made a number of seminal contributions in the field of semiconductor physics. For example, his research on quantum dots has produced several major advances, including studies that revealed the wavefunction character of excitons — quasiparticles found in semiconductors and insulators consisting of an electron bound to its ‘hole’ — and the control of both charge and electronic and nuclear spins.
He is currently Research Director of the EPSRC National Centre for III–V Technologies, the UK centre for the fabrication of III–V semiconductor structures. He has published over 600 papers, which have achieved in excess of 12,000 citations in total. In 2002, he was awarded the Mott Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics. He was elected as a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2011.
