Muhammad Suhail Zubairy


Muhammad Suhail Zubairy, HI, SI, FPAS, is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Texas A&M University and is the inaugural holder of the Munnerlyn-Heep Chair in Quantum Optics. In 2017, Prof. Suhail Zubairy was awarded the Changjiang Distinguished Chair
at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. This is the highest award of the Chinese Government to a university professor and is rarely given to a non-Chinese.
He has made pioneering contributions in the fields of Quantum computing, laser physics and quantum optics. He has authored and co-authored several books and over 300 research papers on a wide variety of research problems relating to theoretical physics. His research and work has been widely recognised by the physics community and he has won many international awards.

Academic career

Zubairy attended Edwardes College in Peshawar where he received double BSc degree in physics and mathematics from Peshawar University, in 1971. He scored highest marks in the BSc in Physics examination, and was conferred with Gold Medal with his degree by Peshawar University. He received MSc in physics from the Quaid-i-Azam University in 1974, and his PhD in physics from the University of Rochester under the guidance of Professor Emil Wolf in 1978. He held research and teaching appointments at the Optical Sciences Center of the University of Arizona and the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of New Mexico before joining the Quaid-i-Azam University in 1984. He served as Professor of Electronics and the founding Chairman of the Department of Electronics at the Quaid-i-Azam University. In 2000, he joined Texas A&M University where he is presently a Distinguished Professor of Physics and the holder of the Munnerlyn-Heep Chair in Quantum Optics. Zubairy has authored over 300 scientific articles and is most well known for the textbook Quantum Optics that he co-authored with Marlan O. Scully.
His research interests are very wide and he has written papers on quantum optical applications to quantum computing, quantum informatics, quantum entanglement and sub-wavelength atom localisation. More recently, Zubairy has concentrated most of his efforts on research in quantum microscopy and quantum lithography, some of which are ground breaking. For example, his papers on sub-wavelength lithography using classical light sources are very well received. His recent Physical Review Letters was reviewed in Physical Review Focus as well as in the News of the Week section of Nature. Another of his recent Physical Review Letters was selected by Science as a news release with the title "A new way to beat the limit on shrinking transistors".

Awards and honours