Nathalie de Leon

Nathalie Pulmones de Leon (born 1982) is a Filipino-American chemist, physicist, and associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University. Her research focuses on building quantum technologies with solid state defects and the identification of novel materials systems for superconducting qubits. She was awarded the 2023 American Physical Society Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing. Nathalie de Leon was born in Makati, the Philippines, in 1982 and raised in California. Her parents were also born in the Philippines. Her maternal grandfather was a commercial seaman who was stationed in San Francisco during the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was subsequently offered U.S. citizenship contingent on joining the United States Coast Guard. de Leon spent part of her childhood in the Philippines but completed high school in the United States. De Leon was an undergraduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. She completed her undergraduate research in the laboratory of Richard Zare, where she worked on laser spectroscopy. She performed laser-based mass spectrometry on meteoritic samples to explore chemical reactions in space. de Leon moved to Harvard University for her doctoral research in chemical physics, where she joined the laboratory of Hongkun Park. Her research looked to achieve nanoscale confinement of electrons and photons. She developed a nanoscale plasmon resonator capable of tailoring specific light-matter interactions, and demonstrated it convert a broadband emitter to a narrow-band single-photon source. de Leon remained at Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher, working with Mikhail Lukin. 2016; Air Force Office for Scientific Research Young Investigator Award 2017; Sloan Research Fellowship 2018: National Science Foundation CAREER Award 2018: Department of Energy Early Career Award 2022: Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing de Leon is married, and met her husband while she was completing her postdoc appointment at Harvard and he was finishing his PhD.