Prof. Aspelmeyer studied physics and philosophy at the University of Munich, receiving his BS in philosophy and his Ph.D in physics in 2002. He joined the group of Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna in 2002 with a Feodor Lynen Post Doctoral Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He became Universitäts assistent at the University and then, Junior, later Senior Researcher, at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences where he is leading a research team working on quantum effects in micro- and nanomechanical systems. His research interests are quantum entanglement and quantum optics.
He was awarded the Lieben Prize in 2007 and an ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant in 2009. He was offered chairs at the University of Oxford, the University of Calgary and the University of Vienna and currently holds the chair for Quantum Information on the Nanoscale at the University of Vienna.
For his work in quantum optics, quantum information and quantum-opto-mechanics he has received the Fresnel Prize of the European Physical Society, the Ignaz Lieben Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Fritz-Kohlrausch Prize of the Austrian Physical Society. Together with Garrett Cole, co-founding partner of Crystalline Mirror Solutions (CMS), he received the second prize of the Berthold Leibinger Innovationspreis in 2016 for the development of substrate-transferred crystalline coatings. In December 2019 CMS was acquired by Thorlabs Inc.
