Maiken Mikkelsen received her B.S. in physics in 2004 from the University of Copenhagen. She received her Ph.D. in physics in 2009 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied single electron spin dynamics in semiconductors for her Ph.D. thesis and for which she won the 2011 Thesis Prize from the Quantum Electronics and Optical Division (QEOD) of the European Physical Society. She did a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the faculty at Duke University in 2012.