The group

Maiken H. Mikkelsen is an experimental physicist working at the intersection of nanophotonics, quantum optics and nonlinear optics. Her research explores how electromagnetic fields structured on atomic and ultrafast scales can control — and sometimes transform — the interaction between light and matter.

Before joining the University of Copenhagen in 2026 she was Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Physics at Duke University, where her group established new approaches to ultrafast single-photon emission, atomic-scale optical cavities, tunable strong coupling, and metasurface-enhanced photodetection. She led the Meta-Imaging MURI, an eight-university program funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research on sensing and computing with dynamic metasurfaces, and an NIH R01 program on nanophotonic biosensors for point-of-care diagnostics. She received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a Fellow of Optica and the recipient of the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award of the American Physical Society, the Moore Inventor Fellowship, and the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award.

Her work at Duke was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, including the Meta-Imaging MURI and an NIH R01 as principal investigator. The Copenhagen laboratory is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.