Eva Olsson is a Swedish physicist who is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and part of the selection committee for the Nobel Prize in Physics.

On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John F. ClauserAlain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger for “experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.”

Eva Olsson said after the announcement of the winners: “Quantum information science is a vibrant and rapidly developing field. It has broad and potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technology.”

“Its origin can be traced to that of quantum mechanics,” she added. “Its predictions have opened doors to another world, and it has also shaken the very foundations of how we interpret measurements.”

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Who is Eva Olsson?

Born on October 12, 1960, Olsson was an undergraduate student in Gothenburg at the Chalmers University of Technology. She worked on mirror furnaces for her undergraduate diploma.

After graduating, she remained at Chalmers and started a doctoral research project studying the interfacial structures of zinc oxide varistor materials. 

She later moved to the US to work as a researcher with David R. Clarke at IBM. She returned to the Chalmers University of Technology in 1991, where she was eventually awarded her docent degree.

The 61-year-old was appointed associate professor at Chalmers in 1996. The following year, she was appointed professor at Uppsala University, where she worked for four years. She then returned to Chalmers as a full time professor. While at Chalmers, Olsson served as Director of Material Analysis, Head of Microscopy and Head of Applied Physics.

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Olsson mainly had her interest in materials for emerging technologies, including catalysis, photovoltaic and quantum devices.

In 2013, Olsson was awarded 33 million SEK from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, with which she developed soft microscopy.

In 2018, she was awarded a further 25 million SEK to study plasmon-exciton coupling.