Physicists and astronomers

Mikael Käll

Mikael Käll is a full professor of physics at Chalmers University of Technology who leads a bionanophotonics group studying plasmonic nanoantennas, metasurfaces, biosensing, and thermoplasmonics.

Mikhail E. Gertsenshtein (Михаил Евгеньевич Герценштейн; 1926–2010) was a Soviet physicist who in 1962 described the Gertsenshtein effect and, with V. I. Pustovoit, the first laser interferometric gravitational-wave detector.

Mikhail Gorodetsky

Mikhail Leonidovich Gorodetsky (Михаил Городецкий; 1966–2019) was a Russian physicist at Moscow State University who pioneered ultra-high-quality dielectric microresonators and worked on quantum measurement for gravitational-wave detectors, including LIGO.

Mikhail Ioffe

Mikhail Solomonovich Ioffe (Михаил Соломонович Иоффе) was a Soviet experimental plasma physicist who stabilized the magnetic-mirror plasma trap against the flute instability in 1961, after which the stabilizing coils became known as Ioffe rods.

Mikhail Katsnelson

Mikhail Katsnelson, born 1957 in Magnitogorsk, is a Russian-Dutch theoretical physicist at Radboud University, a pioneer of graphene theory and winner of the 2013 Spinoza Prize.

Mikhail Lukin

Mikhail Lukin is an American physicist at Harvard University, a University Professor who co-invented the DLCZ quantum repeater protocol and co-founded the quantum companies QuEra Computing and Quantum Diamond Technologies.

Mikhail Shaposhnikov

Mikhail Shaposhnikov, born 1956 in Sochi, Russia, is a theoretical particle physicist and cosmologist, professor emeritus at EPFL, known for electroweak baryogenesis, the νMSM, and the Higgs-as-inflaton proposal.

Mikhail Shifman

Mikhail Shifman (Михаил Шифман) is a theoretical physicist at the University of Minnesota, born in Riga in 1949, known for the penguin mechanism, QCD sum rules, and supersymmetric Yang-Mills results.

Mikhail Zamkov

Mikhail Zamkov is a materials chemist and physics professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, known for developing colloidal quantum shells for solar energy.

Mikio Kozuma

Mikio Kozuma (上妻幹旺) is a Japanese atomic physicist who, in 1999 at the University of Tokyo, demonstrated phase-coherent amplification of matter waves simultaneously with MIT's group.

Mildred S. Dresselhaus

Mildred S. Dresselhaus, known as the "queen of carbon science", was an American MIT physicist whose research on graphite, carbon nanotubes, and graphene reshaped carbon science.

Miles Aylmer Fulton Barnett

Miles Aylmer Fulton Barnett (1901–1979) was a New Zealand physicist who gave the first experimental proof of the ionosphere, then directed the New Zealand Meteorological Service from 1939 to 1962.

Miles J. Padgett

Miles J. Padgett is an optical physicist who holds the Kelvin Chair at the University of Glasgow and studies shaped light beams, including orbital angular momentum.

Sep 17, 2026

Miles V. Klein

Miles V. Klein, also known as Miles Vincent Klein, was an American condensed matter physicist at Illinois whose group made the first Raman measurement of the superconducting gap.

Milton S. Plesset

Milton S. Plesset (1908–1991) was an American applied physicist, professor at Caltech, whose name attaches to the Rayleigh–Plesset equation for cavitation bubble growth and collapse.

Oct 22, 2026

Milutin Milanković

Milutin Milanković (Милутин Миланковић, 1879 to 1958) was a Serbian mathematician and astronomer at the University of Belgrade known for his astronomical theory of climate change explaining ice ages.

Miṅ Gu

Min Gu (顾敏) is a photonics researcher known for nanoscale optical data storage and holography, and Executive Chancellor at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology since 2019.

Min S. Yun

Min S. Yun is an American radio astronomer and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, known for his 1994 hydrogen map of the M81 galaxy group.

Sep 17, 2026

Ming-Jun Li

Ming-Jun Li is an optical fiber physicist and Corporate Fellow at Corning, inventor of ClearCurve bend-insensitive fiber and LEAF fiber, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018.

Mingda Li

Mingda Li is an associate professor at MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, known for integrating AI with scattering and spectroscopy to measure quantum-material properties.

Minhaeng Cho

Minhaeng Cho is a South Korean chemist at Korea University known for two-dimensional spectroscopy and the first femtosecond measurement of vibrational optical activity, published in Nature in 2009.

Minoru Oda

Minoru Oda (小田稔) was a Japanese astrophysicist known as the father of Japanese X-ray astronomy; he invented the modulation collimator and led Japan's X-ray satellites.

Miquel Salmerón

Miquel Salmerón is a Spanish-born surface physicist and Senior Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who developed ambient-pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and high-pressure microscopy for studying catalysts under real working conditions.