We are pleased to welcome our newest hires of our Quantum Science and Engineering Collaborative, Dries Sels and Nikola Maksimovic! 

Dries Sels received degrees in electrical engineering from KU Leuven and in nanoscience from TU Delft in 2010, where he worked on quantum transport in nanowire transistors. He earned his PhD at the University of Antwerp, developing path-integral methods for Wigner distributions and quantum corrections to Boltzmann’s equation.

After postdoctoral work at Boston University and Harvard University, he joined the faculty at New York University and became an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute in 2020. In 2026, he rejoined Boston University as a faculty member in the quantum condensed matter theory group. His research focuses on non-equilibrium many-body systems, quantum algorithms, optimal control, and classical simulation of quantum systems. He is a 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in Physics.

Nikola Maksimovic is an experimental condensed matter physicist interested in studying the behavior of many-body quantum systems. His lab develops methods to synthesize new materials and investigate their properties using quantum sensor microscopes.

Before joining BU, Nikola was an ORISE postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He completed his PhD in physics at University of California Berkeley for which he was awarded the Jackson C. Koo award in 2022, and his BS in Engineering Physics and Applied Math at University of Colorado Boulder in 2016.