Shimon Kolkowitz grew up in Palo Alto, California. His first experience with research was in high school, when he worked for two years as a NASA intern at the Ames Research Center. Shimon earned his undergraduate degree at Stanford University, where he worked on the Enriched Xenon Observatory neutrino physics experiment in the Gratta group. Shimon is currently pursuing a physics PhD at Harvard in Mikhail Lukin’s group, where he is studying nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond.