Dr. Elena Voss

Elena Voss was born and raised in Innsbruck, Austria, a city she describes as having 'the Alps on one side and a very good physics department on the other.' Her mother was a secondary school mathematics teacher; her father, a violist in the Innsbruck Symphony Orchestra. She learned to play the viola herself and performed with the Vienna University Orchestra through her master's degree, giving up only when the demands of her doctoral research at ETH Zürich left no room for rehearsal schedules.

Her doctoral thesis, completed under a supervisor who had been a graduate student of John Bell, concerned the quantum measurement problem — specifically, how quantum systems lose their coherent superpositions through environmental interaction. The work was technically formidable but also explicitly philosophical: Voss was interested not just in the mathematics of decoherence but in what it meant for the question of what is real in quantum mechanics. She defended with distinction in 2004.

At Princeton she extended her research into quantum information, publishing a series of papers on the relationship between decoherence timescales and the resources required for quantum computation. Her 2007 paper in Physical Review A on 'environmentally induced superselection' has become a standard reference in quantum foundations courses at several leading universities.

She returned to Europe for a faculty position at LMU Munich, where she became known for a course called 'Quantum Mechanics Without the Mysticism' — a rigorous but conceptually honest introduction to the subject that refused both the 'shut up and calculate' dismissiveness and the popular science tendency to invoke quantum mechanics as metaphysics. The course title became the title of her popular science book in 2017, which was shortlisted for the German Science Book Prize.

Voss is fluent in German, English, and French, and reads scientific literature in Italian. She is a long-distance runner who has completed several marathons, including Boston in 2019, and describes running as 'the closest I come to not thinking.' She gives a small number of public lectures each year, chosen for their opportunity to correct specific misconceptions about quantum mechanics she finds particularly troubling.