Chetan Nayak

1. 1988 · age 17
   Won the top prize at the Science Talent Search
   A Stuyvesant High School student.
2. 1992 · age 21
   Earned BA from Harvard University.
3. 1996 · age 25
   Completed PhD at Princeton under Frank Wilczek
   Co-discovered non-Abelian statistics associated with Majorana zero modes.
4. 1997 · age 26
   Became professor of physics at UCLA.
5. 2005 · age 34
   Joined Microsoft; co-authored proposal
   For topological qubit with Freedman and Das Sarma.
6. 2014 · age 43
   Became director and general manager of Microsoft Station Q.
7. 2025 · age 54
   Team unveiled the Majorana 1 chip
   An eight-qubit topological processor.

Nayak co-discovered non-Abelian statistics in paired quantum Hall states with Frank Wilczek in 1996 at 25, a result that became the cornerstone of Microsoft's topological quantum computing program. He won the Science Talent Search in 1988 as a Stuyvesant High School student, earned his BA from Harvard at 21, and his PhD from Princeton at 25. He became a professor at UCLA at 26 and joined Microsoft in 2005, eventually leading Microsoft Station Q's quantum hardware efforts.

advantage confidence: Medium · source count: 4 · audit: not_independently_audited · status: subagent_researched_beta

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chetan_Nayak
• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/cnayak/
• https://www.hertzfoundation.org/people/chetan-nayak/
• https://news.ucsb.edu/people/chetan-nayak