Steven Cundiff is the Harrison M. Randall Collegiate Professor of Physics and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan. In 1995 he joined Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ as a postdoctoral member of the technical staff. In 1997, he moved to JILA, a joint institute between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado, Boulder.  At JILA, he was both a physicist with NIST and adjoint faculty at the university. From 2004-2009 he was chief of the NIST Quantum Physics Division. He moved to the University of Michigan in 2015.

Cundiff received his B.A. in physics from Rutgers University in 1985 and his Ph.D. in applied physics from the University of Michigan in 1992. In 1993-1994 he was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral scientist at the University of Marburg, Germany. 

Cundiff is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), Optica, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Cundiff received the Humboldt Research Award in 2010 and the OSA Meggers award in 2011. He chaired the 2014 APS Division of Laser Science. He works in the field of ultrafast optics, including the development and application of multidimensional coherent spectroscopy and of frequency combs, recently demonstrating the combination of these two fields.